Archive for May, 2015

I was a little surprised when I saw even the Los Angeles Times editorial condemn the rank hypocrisy of labor unions:

Editorial L.A. labor leaders’ hypocrisy on minimum wage hike
By The Times Editorial Board
▼ Los Angeles labor leaders fought for a minimum wage hike; now they want to be exempt from it
▼ L.A. County Federation of Labor is being hypocritical in its stance on raising the minimum wage
May 29, 2015, 5:00 AM

No, employers with a unionized workforce should not be allowed to pay less than Los Angeles’ proposed minimum wage. It’s stunning that after leading the fight for a $15 citywide minimum wage and vehemently opposing efforts to exempt restaurant workers, nonprofits and small businesses from the full wage hike, the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor is now lobbying for an exemption for employers with union contracts. That’s right — labor leaders are advocating that an employer should have the right to pay union members less than the minimum wage.

This is hypocrisy at its worst, and it plays into the cynical view that the federation is more interested in unionizing companies and boosting its rolls of dues-paying members than in helping poor workers. Such an exemption would create an incentive for companies to allow unions in — but rather than helping workers, it would undermine the purpose of the minimum wage ordinance, which is to set a new, higher pay floor in order to help lift the greatest number of low-wage Angelenos out of poverty.

Because to be a Democrat is to be a fascist who says, “What is good for me to force on thee should not apply to me.”

And of course there has never been in all of human history a politician who exemplified that spirit of elitist liberal entitlement than Hillary Clinton. Which is why hypocrite Democrats love her so much.

Here’s another one: Same newspaper, same day, revealing how liberals are HYPOCRITES without shame, without honor, without virtue, without decency, without integrity. As you read the following LA Times article listen to my voice in your head screaming, “JUST HOW THE HELL IS IT THAT THESE LIBERAL DEMOCRAT HOLLYWOOD COCKROACHES WHO DEMAND HIGHER TAXES ON EVERYBODY ELSE ARE CHASING TAX BREAKS RIGHT OUT OF THE DAMN STATE???

Other media companies have contributed more significantly to Mr. Obama, including Time Warner, owner of CNN and the magazine publishing house Time Inc. The company, which is based in New York and also owns Warner Brothers and HBO, has contributed $191,834 to Mr. Obama in the 2012 election cycle, compared with $10,750 to Mr. Romney

Which is to say, having done the math, that Warner Bros. is 1,692.84 percent more Obama-liberal than it is Romney-Republican. And virtually every single media outlet today is a whore of liberal ideology, pumping their propaganda into the mindless heads of pathologically depraved cows who gobble it up like pigs shoving their faces into their feeding trough. I mean, when I was a child, I used to spit into fish ponds and watch in amazement as the goldfish swarmed to be the first to dine on my loogie. But only now do I realize that I was receiving an object lesson in how liberals teach and how liberals learn.

Liberals are Nazis who say, “What is good for me to force on thee does not apply to me.

Now watch how real liberals act when it’s THEIR money rather than somebody else’s money:

Big movies in short supply in California, FilmL.A. says
By Richard Verrier
▼ Only two big-budget movies released in 2014 were filmed in California
▼ Few big movies have filmed in California because they were excluded from the state’s financial incentives
May 28, 2015, 5:59 PM

The big movie hitting theaters this weekend is “San Andreas,” depicting the destruction of California from a massive earthquake.

The Warner Bros. movie was filmed mainly in Australia, of course.

Such is the reality that California faces in an industry where tax credits and other financial inducements increasingly drive where movies are filmed around the world.

Fresh evidence of that emerged Thursday in a feature film study from FilmL.A. Inc., the nonprofit group that handles film permits for the city and county.

The second annual report found that only 22 of 106 films released by the major studios in 2014 were actually filmed in California. The rest of the movies were shot in New York, Britain, Canada, Georgia, Louisiana, Australia and a dozen other states and countries.

Only two films with budgets above $100 million were filmed primarily in California: Marvel’s “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” and Paramount’s “Interstellar.” Even those films spent considerable time and money in other locations that offer tax credits and rebates to lure filmmakers.

The exodus of big movies from California has been happening for years. When local film production peaked in 1997, 64% of the top 25 movies at the box office were filmed in California, compared with 16% last year.

“We’ve waited so long to truly get involved in the competition that we’ve allowed some major production centers to be created around the world,” said Paul Audley, president of FilmL.A.

The report notes that several high-profile movies set in California have filmed elsewhere, including Warner Bros.’ “Godzilla,” which was shot mainly in Vancouver, Canada; 20th Century Fox’s “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” which was filmed in Louisiana; and Disney’s “Million Dollar Arm,” which was shot mainly in Georgia.

As for “San Andreas,” the movie filmed some scenes in Los Angeles and San Francisco but most of the two-month shoot took place at Village Roadshow’s Studio on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia.

The $110-million movie, from Warner Bros.’ New Line Cinema unit, received a portion of a $20-million film fund specifically designed to attract foreign productions.

Warner’s decision was not surprising.

Few big movies have filmed in California because they were excluded from the state’s financial incentives.

That’s about to change. To stop the exodus of production, state lawmakers last year approved an expansion of the film and TV tax credit program. The new program triples annual funding to $330 million a year and for the first time allows big budget films to apply for the incentives.

Studios will apply for feature film tax credits under the new program in July.

“The new program should result in us getting several of the large features back in California,” Audley said.

While the same Democrats who are giving tax credits to hypocrite liberal moviemakers impose sky-high taxes on all the other businesses and people they’re crushing and oppressing right out of the state.

If you are not truly and astonishingly STUPID, you understand that low taxes are the key to healthy businesses. The problem with these liberals isn’t that they’re dumb, it is that they are utterly depraved moral hypocrites who because they are the human equivalent of cockroaches are ONLY capable of caring about THEMSELVES and to hell with everybody else.

Now, elitist jet-setting liberals right out of The Who’s song “Eminence Front” DO understand that the overwhelming majority of Democrats are just rank-and-goose-stepping-Nazi-file STUPID as well as depraved. They are little more than dumb farm-animal-cattle who are so easily lied to and manipulated and duped and led by the nose by lies that it is beyond amazing. But yeah, stupid Democrat: “it’s an eminence front.” And “it’s a put on.” That’s what liberalism is, that’s what the Democrat Party represents: an eminence front, a bright-shining lie.

Let’s force ObamaCare. And exempt ourselves. Let’s force higher wages. And exempt ourselves. Let’s force higher taxes. And exempt ourselves. And anybody who thinks liberals give one flying DAMN about the poor are poor – in the sense of completely lacking in either rational or moral-capacity – deluded fools.

FBI agents arrested the officials meeting in Switzerland, as the head of the Justice Department described a conspiracy of bribery and corruption in the selection of World Cup host countries and sponsors.

The Clinton Foundation, already under fire for accepting multimillion-dollar contributions from nations including Saudi Arabia, disclosed only the range of the contribution — from $50,001 to $100,000.

Meanwhile, as we speak, on this very day’s headlines, even the New York Times is calling what the Clintons did “distasteful”:

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Petra Nemcova, a Czech model who survived the disaster by clinging to a palm tree, decided to pull out all the stops for the annual fund-raiser of her school-building charity, the Happy Hearts Fund.

She booked Cipriani 42nd Street, which greeted guests with Bellini cocktails on silver trays. She flew in Sheryl Crow with her band and crew for a 20-minute set. She special-ordered heart-shaped floral centerpieces, heart-shaped chocolate parfaits, heart-shaped tiramisù and, because orange is the charity’s color, an orange carpet rather than a red one. She imported a Swiss auctioneer and handed out orange rulers to serve as auction paddles, playfully threatening to use hers to spank the highest bidder for an Ibiza vacation.

The gala cost $363,413. But the real splurge? Bill Clinton.

The former president of the United States agreed to accept a lifetime achievement award at the June 2014 event after Ms. Nemcova offered a $500,000 contribution to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. The donation, made late last year after the foundation sent the charity an invoice, amounted to almost a quarter of the evening’s net proceeds — enough to build 10 preschools in Indonesia.

Happy Hearts’ former executive director believes the transaction was a “quid pro quo,” which rerouted donations intended for a small charity with the concrete mission of rebuilding schools after natural disasters to a large foundation with a broader agenda and a budget 100 times bigger.

“The Clinton Foundation had rejected the Happy Hearts Fund invitation more than once, until there was a thinly veiled solicitation and then the offer of an honorarium,” said the former executive director, Sue Veres Royal, who held that position at the time of the gala and was dismissed a few weeks later amid conflicts over the gala and other issues.

Press officers for Ms. Nemcova and for the Clinton Foundation said on Thursday that the foundation had not solicited the donation and that the money would be used for projects in Haiti, as yet undetermined.

The Happy Hearts Fund and the Clinton Foundation “have a shared goal of providing meaningful help to Haiti,” the school charity’s spokeswoman said. “We believe that we can create the most impactful change by working together.”

Never publicly disclosed, the episode provides a window into the way the Clinton Foundation relies on the Clintons’ prestige to amass donors large and small, offering the prospect, as described in the foundation’s annual report, of lucrative global connections and participation in a worldwide mission to “unlock human potential” through “the power of creative collaboration.”

Similarly, Ms. Nemcova, like other celebrity philanthropists, uses her fame to promote her charity — which has financed more than 110 schools, mostly kindergartens — just as she uses Happy Hearts to position herself as a model-humanitarian.

“This is primarily a small but telling example of the way the Clintons operate,” said Doug White, who directs the master’s program in fund-raising management at Columbia University. “The model has responsibility; she paid a high price for a feel-good moment with Bill Clinton. But he was riding the back of this small charity for what? A half-million bucks? I find it — what would be the word? — distasteful.”

In her letter of invitation to Mr. Clinton, Ms. Nemcova, then chairwoman of her charity’s board, said she wanted to show her appreciation for his “inspirational leadership” after disasters.

“My gratitude to you is so strong that should you accept, we will schedule our event commemorating the 10th anniversary around your schedule,” she wrote, speaking of their shared dedication to the survivors of both the tsunami and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

When the tsunami struck in December 2004, Ms. Nemcova, who had been featured on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue the previous year, was vacationing in Thailand with her boyfriend, a fashion photographer named Simon Atlee. They were swept from their beach cottage and separated in the turbulent waters; Mr. Atlee died.

Ms. Nemcova, her pelvis shattered, held fast to a tree for hours until she was rescued, listening impotently to the cries of children, she has said, which later motivated her to found her child-centric charity.

Happy Hearts rebuilt two schools in Thailand while Mr. Clinton was the United Nations’ envoy for tsunami relief and reconstruction. Most of the charity’s rebuilding has been in Indonesia after the earthquakes of 2006 and 2009.

After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Ms. Nemcova turned her attention to that small island nation, where both Mr. Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton, as secretary of state, played outsize roles in the earthquake relief effort and the more problem-filled reconstruction. The country had attracted other celebrity benefactors, too, notably the actor Sean Penn, an ex-boyfriend of Ms. Nemcova’s who had created his own relief organization and forged a relationship with Mr. Clinton.

In the fall of 2011, many players in Haiti’s rebuilding effort, including Ms. Nemcova, attended the Clinton Global Initiative’s membership meeting in Manhattan. Members, who must be invited, pay $20,000 in annual dues, largely for the yearly gatherings, where charity founders and entrepreneurs get to network with world leaders, corporate executives and wealthy donors.

Clinton Foundation Bills Small Charity for Big Donation

Six months after Bill Clinton accepted a lifetime achievement award at the Happy Hearts Fund gala in June 2014, the Clinton Foundation sent this invoice to the charity, run by the model Petra Nemcova. It sought to collect a $500,000 donation.

At the meeting, Ms. Nemcova signed a memorandum of understanding with the president of the Inter-American Development Bank to finance schools in Haiti. The development bank has also donated to the Clinton Foundation — just over $1 million — and it partnered with Mrs. Clinton’s State Department after the earthquake to create an industrial park in northern Haiti.

Almost four years after Happy Hearts and the development bank made their commitment, they have yet to complete a single school, partly because of problems finding suitable land. Five schools are under construction.

Happy Hearts collaborated more expeditiously in Haiti with the Digicel Foundation, whose founder, the Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien, is a multimillion-dollar supporter of the Clinton Foundation and whose parent telecommunications company benefited from grants from Mrs. Clinton’s State Department.

Digicel also made a commitment at the 2011 meeting to build schools; the commitment was a formality, though, as Digicel had already taken the lead in Haiti in that realm. It has built 150 schools there over the last seven years; Happy Heart has built seven, six of them joint or side-by-side ventures with Digicel.

One of those schools, operated by the Haitian group Prodev, was featured in the Clinton Foundation’s most recent annual report as “built through a Clinton Global Initiative Commitment to Action.” The Clinton Foundation’s sole direct contribution to the school was a grant for an Earth Day celebration and tree-planting activity.

In late 2011, Ms. Nemcova dedicated her charity’s annual fund-raiser to Haiti, awarding the lifetime achievement honor to Mr. Penn, whom the Haitian government had named an ambassador at large, and giving a speaking platform to Laurent Lamothe, Haiti’s foreign minister.

The next year, Ms. Nemcova, too, became an ambassador at large for Haiti. And by 2013, she was practically living there, having become romantically involved with Mr. Lamothe, by then prime minister. (Mr. Lamothe, no longer prime minister, is now a presidential candidate in Haiti, and the couple have split up.)

Through the years, Ms. Nemcova, 35, has blended her personal and philanthropic lives; her sister replaced Ms. Veres Royal as executive director of Happy Hearts. She has also mingled her celebrity and charity work, both in ways that benefited the charity and in ways that benefited her personally.

In 2011, when she appeared as a contestant on ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars,” her survival story and charity received ample, positive attention. She brought on Clinique and Chopard as sponsors of the charity, but also accepted personal fees to model their products.

“Ms. Nemcova has a long career as a model in fashion industry for 16 years and has longstanding relationships with many brands,” her charity’s spokeswoman said. “Happy Hearts Fund is grateful for Chopard’s and Clinique’s support.”

At the 2014 gala, Chopard, a Swiss jeweler that was dedicating partial proceeds from a heart-shaped bracelet to the charity, set up lighted showcases in the cocktail area, Ms. Veres Royal said.

“They were peddling exorbitant jewelry at a gala that was supposed to focus on children who have lost their belongings, homes, and often friends and family members,” she said. “It was inappropriate and tacky. Too many people at that event were looking after their own interests first.”

Happy Hearts Fund first asked Mr. Clinton to be its honoree in 2011. Trying again in 2013, Ms. Nemcova sent her first formal letter of invitation in July, asking Mr. Clinton to be the primary award recipient at a Happy Hearts gala on Nov. 4, 2013, celebrating Indonesia.

Mr. Clinton’s scheduler replied with a cordial rejection — “Regrettably, he is committed to another event out of town that same evening” — in an email copied to Frank Giustra, the Canadian mining financier who is one of the Clinton Foundation’s largest donors and also a supporter of Ms. Nemcova.

Haitians protested outside the Happy Hearts Fund gala, which Mr. Clinton attended after Ms. Nemcova pledged $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Her charity has worked with the Clinton Foundation on projects in Haiti. Credit Tony Savino/Corbis

Ms. Nemcova subsequently met with officers at the Clinton Foundation, Ms. Veres Royal said. Afterward, she said, “Petra called me and said we have to include an honorarium for him — that they don’t look at these things unless money is offered, and it has to be $500,000.”

The invitation letter was revised and sent again at the end of August. It moved the gala to 2014, offered to work around Mr. Clinton’s availability, dropped the focus on Indonesia and shifted it to Haiti, and proposed the donation.

“Understanding the need and commitment to ‘rebuilding better,’ Happy Hearts Fund would like to also share the proceeds of the event with the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, committing at least $500,000 in partnership on a joint educational project in Haiti, of your selection,” Ms. Nemcova wrote, ending with her customary signoff, “Lots of Love, Light and Laughter.”

When charities select an honoree for their fund-raising events, they generally expect that the award recipient will help them raise money by attracting new donors. But the Happy Hearts Fund raised less money at the gala featuring Mr. Clinton than it did at its previous one.

Further, it is extremely rare for honorees, or their foundations, to be paid from a gala’s proceeds, charity experts said — as it is for the proceeds to be diverted to a different cause.

And while the original invitation letter spoke of a joint educational project, the Clinton Foundation said Thursday that Happy Hearts had agreed that the money could be “split 50/50” between the foundation’s education programs and its economic development and agriculture programs in Haiti.

In the charity gala world, it is considered unacceptable to spend more than a third of gross proceeds on costs, and better to spend considerably less. If the donation to the Clinton Foundation were counted as a cost, Happy Hearts would have spent 34 percent of its announced $2.5 million in proceeds on its gala.

Its actual expenses — while they might seem extravagant to outsiders, with the total cost of the Cipriani facility alone at almost $300 a head — were in line with what other charities spend on such events.

In the end, the Happy Hearts Fund’s gala was a star-studded event, with celebrities including Naomi Watts and John Legend and the models Karlie Kloss and Coco Rocha in attendance. The Haitian president, Michel Martelly, a former musician who was Ms. Nemcova’s boyfriend’s boss at the time, was a second honoree, and he performed a couple of numbers with Wyclef Jean.

At the start of the evening, school bells rang and, as the master program dictated, “Petra dressed as schoolteacher” appeared, wearing glasses.

“Good evening, class,” said the message on the screen behind her. She later changed into a sheer red lace gown donated by the designer Naeem Khan, with diamond and ruby jewelry by Chopard.

A video by the Happy Hearts Fund framed the moment she presented the award to Mr. Clinton like this: “Ten years ago, two people were deeply impacted by the 2004 tsunami. They met this year again to inspire …”

“Petra did not have to devote 10 years of her life to building these schools,” Mr. Clinton told the crowd. “But what she has done is a symbol of what I think we all have to do.”

Countries and companies that donated to the Clinton Foundation or paid Bill Clinton heavy fees for speeches saw an increase in State Department activity while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state.

The presidential candidate’s supporters have dismissed as conspiracy theories allegations that she and her husband traded political favors for contributions to their foundation or for lucrative speaking engagements.

A Washington Examiner analysis of Clinton Foundation donors suggests the State Department ramped up its diplomatic activity, foreign assistance and/or investment in countries that gave to the Clinton Foundation and hosted Bill Clinton for high-profile speeches.

For example, months after Bill Clinton delivered a speech in Riyadh for a price of $300,000, State Department funding for projects and activities in Saudi Arabia spiked.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has also donated between $10 million and $25 million to the Clinton Foundation, donor records show.

State Department funding for its diplomatic operations and projects in the country jumped from more than $18 million in 2011 to $67.75 million in 2012, the year after Bill Clinton delivered his speech at the Saudi Investment Authority, according to USASpending.gov.

Much of that appears to have gone toward the construction of new State Department buildings in the country.

The agency poured $177.9 million into building a new embassy in Norway in 2011 over the apparent objections of diplomatic officials in Oslo.

Norway’s government has donated between $10 million and $25 million to the Clinton Foundation.

A leaked diplomatic cable sent to Clinton in July 2009 shows plans for the embassy project, which predated Clinton’s tenure as secretary, had been pushed from 2011 to 2020 to free up funding for embassies in key countries.

“We understand the arguments for first building NEC’s [new embassy complexes] where terrorist threats are higher,” the cable said of the delayed embassy plans in Norway.

The cable mentions “Pat Kennedy,” the undersecretary for management and a close Clinton aide, among the State Department officials who had helped to further the project.

Kennedy’s name also surfaced in Benghazi-related emails published by the State Department last week.

Despite the misgivings by agency officials in 2009, the State Department awarded the contract for the Norwegian embassy to Walsh Construction Group on September 27, 2011. It was the construction company’s first overseas embassy project.

Norway teamed up with an arm of the Clinton Foundation in September 2012 for an ambitious health care project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is part of the State Department.

USAID, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, the Children’s Investment Fund, the U.K. and Sweden supported the development of a type of contraceptive produced by Bayer that was widely distributed in poor nations.

All but Sweden and USAID itself were Clinton Foundation donors.

“The US Agency for International Development (USAID) is proud to have funded the development of this life-saving product,” then-USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah said at the time.

The same year USAID announced its plan to purchase 27 million contraceptive devices from Bayer, which donated between $20,000 and $50,000 to the Clinton Foundation, the pharmaceutical company hired lobbyists with DLA Piper (itself a foundation donor) to lobby the State Department on “federal procurement issues,” according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Bayer did not return a request for comment.

USAID and the State Department appear to have tapped Clinton-connected companies regularly for well intentioned projects around the world.

One month before Hillary Clinton left office, her agency launched an effort to expand the electronic banking sector in Afghanistan.

Citi, the Ford Foundation, Visa, Omidyar Network, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation were each involved in the USAID-backed initiative. All five donated heavily to the Clinton Foundation.

Hillary Clinton kicked off a taxpayer-funded effort to bring health information to pregnant women around the world through their phones in 2011 with the help of two foundation donors — Johnson & Johnson and the United Nations Foundation.

The “Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action” initiative won an award for its innovation in 2012 after being judged by an independent panel that included additional donors to the Clinton Foundation.

The Clinton Health Access Initiative was brought into a State Department health project called the President’s Malaria Initiative alongside two of its major donors.

While the malaria initiative began in the Bush administration, it consumed millions while Hillary Clinton was at the State Department.

Irish Aid, Ireland’s development agency, and the British version of USAID — both foundation donors of between $1 million and $5 million — also shared in the U.S.-backed project in Uganda.

Ireland saw a substantial increase in the money USAID and the State Department spent on operations and projects there while Hillary Clinton was in office.

She even made Ireland the site of her final official trip as secretary of state when she traveled there to receive an award from one of her family foundation’s top donors.

The State Department increased its spending in Ireland from $1.65 million in 2009 to $2.96 million in 2010 and $7.48 million in 2011.

USAID also upped its support of Ireland, taking its funding from nothing in 2008 — the oldest year for which data is available — to $29.87 million the year Clinton came into office.

After the Kingdom of Bahrain donated heavily to the Clinton Foundation, the State Department stepped up its activities in the Middle Eastern nation.

The agency’s contracts, grants, loans and investments in Bahrain climbed from $6.8 million the year before Clinton came to the State Department, to $7.1 million in 2009, to $8.9 million in 2011 and peaked at $11 million during Clinton’s final year in office.

Bahrain also enjoyed nearly $2 million from USAID in 2010, bringing its total State Department funding that year to more than $10 million.

To put that figure in perspective, the State Department spent just $1.9 million on its operations in Trinidad & Tobago, the country whose GDP was closest to Bahrain’s, in 2010. The agency spent just $1.3 million on its operations in Mauritius, the country whose population was closest to Bahrain’s, that same year.

United Arab Emirates and Jamaica, two other countries whose governments donated directly to the Clinton Foundation, also saw the State Department’s funding rise during Clinton’s tenure.

USAID’s support of its operations and other projects in Jamaica crept from $2.8 million the year before Clinton took office to $15.8 million in 2011.

State Department spending in the United Arab Emirates rose from $11.57 million in 2008 to $16.79 million in 2012, peaking in 2010 at $21.18 million.

The Clinton Foundation did not return a request for comment about the nature of its direct work with the State Department while Clinton ran the agency.

The Clintons are so damn cynical it is beyond unreal. They are the posters of official government corruption on planet earth today. And Obama tolerated it for the simple reason that it is the heart and soul of the Democrat Party to be corrupt and to cynically exploit the giant government they keep making more giant to enrich themselves and their cronies who support their ideology and their own palm-greasing.

Here’s another story fresh off the headlines of today appearing on Yahoo News’ feed today:

Just two days after President Obama confirmed that Hillary Clinton would be his secretary of state, Bill Clinton set up a shell corporation to “channel” his payments for unspecified consulting work.

Another day, another revelation about the Clintons’ tangled financial web. (Kudos to Robert Wargas of Pajamas Media for pinning down the date Bill set up his dodge.)

With WJC LLC set up as a limited-liability company with no assets and no employees, there was no need to report any of the cash that passed through it — not on Hillary’s personal disclosure statements then, not on her campaign forms now.

No doubt the Clintons giggled all the way to the bank about their no-funny-business promises to President Obama and his team.

And now Hillary preaches the virtues of “transparency.”

Like everything else about the once “dirt poor” Clintons (now comfortable in the ranks of the 1 percent) the LLC raises huge questions. Questions like those Democrats raised in 2012 about Mitt Romney’s finances.

As the Associated Press (which first reported the existence of the LLC) notes, almost nothing about the exact nature and financial worth of Bill Clinton’s business interests, other than his ultra-lucrative speechmaking, is a matter of public record.

The Clinton camp insists it’s all nothing to worry about, that everything has been disclosed. Then again, that’s what they said before ’fessing up to $26 million in foreign donations they’d “overlooked.”

Don’t let anyone capture you with empty philosophies and high-sounding nonsense that come from human thinking and from the spiritual powers of this world, rather than from Christ – Colossians 2:8

I vividly recall a former professor of mine who described the personal impact of his visit to Auschwitz. The thing that hit him hardest, he said, was when he looked into the rooms where the Nazis had collected all the possessions of the death camp victims: a giant room filled with suitcases here, another room filled with human hair there. And the thing that hit him at that moment was that ideas have consequences, and that the virus that created Auschwitz and all the camps like it had emerged decades before they were constructed. It was ideas like atheism, Darwinism, Nietzscheism, existentialism and deconstructionism that became the intellectual foundation upon which those camps were built. The virus began in the halls of academia – just as our most cancerous and most toxic ideas spread here and now – and spread throughout a German culture which had abandoned belief in God beyond any culture around it. Because of the work of German liberal theologians such as Julius Wellhausen, Franz Delitzsch, Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althous, Emanual Hirsch, among others, the reliability and integrity of the Bible was stunningly undermined to the degree that the Bible was nothing more than a collection of myths and fables. Oh, there were true Christian intellectuals such as the great Dietrich Bonhoeffer – who himself would perish in the camps – but these were too few and far between to counter the toxic avalanche of secular humanism all around them. And as the impact of the vile philosophy and theology of Nazism began to spread, there was simply nothing substantial to counter it.

THAT is precisely where our culture is today and it is coming from the same theological and philosophical traditions.

Martin Heidegger was and actually remains a darling among liberal academia. It is only a slightly embarrassing fact that the man’s existentialist philosophy enabled him and even drove him to be one of the most ardent Nazis in Germany – such that he first became a member of THE most radical Nazi faction and ultimately lost his rectorate at Frieburg after his political patrons were purged for being TOO extreme before Hitler was ready to take the next step. Heidegger formally abandoned his Catholicism – which conflicted with both his philosophy and his Nazi politics. His existentialism drove him to determine to break with “Hebraism” as well as all “metaphysics,” “But to achieve such a rupture, Christian and humanist values would have to be discarded too” [from The German Churches Under Hitler: Background, Struggle, and Epilogue by Ernst Christian Helmreich, 1979, p. 215].

Christian humanism and secular humanism went to war – and secular humanism won in pre-World War II Germany. And then proceeded to murder all its Christian rivals.

Another example of this very same phenomenon is seen in the deconstructionist philosopher Paul De Man. His work in deconstructionism was adored by the political left and the man was a devout Nazi

And then you’ve got Ezra Pound, the famous literary theorist – and Nazi – who denounced Christianity as something “riddled with semitism” as Hitler himself directly quoted in his Mein Kampf.

These men, along with Hitler, had the project of first tearing Christianity down and ultimately tearing it out by its roots and burning it. They construed a conflict between “nature” and “anti-nature” (which is one of the reasons why Nazism – and its adherents such as Heidegger – was an environmentalist movement. On their narrative, Judaism and Christianity were both “anti-nature” because of their focus on a transcendent God and transcendent moral values that restricted the freedom of man and nature. Whereas nature is immanent. The Nazi project was to forge a counter-spirituality that would enable the people to find fulfillment even as the Nazis were freed to exercise their power of will. The Nazis attacked Christianity from hypocritical premises: on the one hand, they assailed Judeo-Christianity for its intolerance and its fostering of guilt even as they, on the other hand, attacked it for its altruism, for its protecting the weak against the strong, for its clear political implications resulting in liberty and equality. Ezra Pound argued that there was “no sense of social order in the teachings if the irresponsible protagonist of the New Testament” (quoted in The Geneology of Demons, Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound by Robert Castillo, 1988, p. 95]. The Nazis blamed the Protestant Reformation for the revival of Hebrew texts (the Bible) and ways of thinking, and thus for the decline of Europe. Even though the so-called “Enlightenment” began AFTER and BECAUSE OF the Protestant Reformation.

When the epidemic virus of Nazism became a full-fledged pandemic in German culture, it was because Judeo-Christianity had been weakened, if not eradicated, and because there was no competing intellectual, philosophical, religious, theological alternative to prevent, stop, or even slow down its rise.

And the same thing not only IS happening but already HAS happened in the United States. And we are seeing the consequences all around us as the National Socialist German Workers Party is reborn as the National Socialist American Workers Party driven by the identical philosophical and religious notions.

The same philosophical traditions – if not the same actual philosophers themselves – that enabled the rise of Nazism continue to dominate the leftist intellectual tradition today: postmodernism, existentialism, deconstructionism, logical positivism, religious liberalism.

It’s all too easy to document the American progressive liberal disdain for Judeo-Christianity and for the integrity and reliability of the Bible which informs it and is its source and foundation:

Obama mockingly asks, “Whose Christianity would we teach in the schools?” Because Christianity is nothing more than a man-made religion and it is completely relative and totally bound by culture and subject to constant change for the simple reason that there is and can be no eternal, everlasting God to make it permanent. And Obama mocks, “Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy?” Because the Word of God is nothing more than the word of man and bigoted, intolerant, racist man at that. And it is immoral to allow Judeo-Christianity or the Bible to have ANY role in our culture as a result.

And we all shouted, “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Heil Obama! Heil Obama! Heil Obama!” Because there is nothing left BUT Obama to hold this culture or this nation together. Or to put it another way: if this nation has a God or a moral code that Obama has NOT mocked and undermined and ignored, I’d like to know who He or she or it is. (In this age where the left has embraced the transgender man-woman shemale, I suppose you have to consider all the myriad possibilities).

I also find it striking how liberal Democrats are exploiting race versus how the Nazis exploited race. Both rose to power by making race and racism an issue and encouraging people of race to politically rise against another race due to perceived injustices. The Nazis screamed, “The Jews have usurped power and they’re oppressing you!” The liberal Democrats scream, “The whites (particularly white men) have usurped power and they’re oppressing you!”

Crucify Him! At least that’s what the Nazis did. That’s what Islamic State is doing now. And as for liberal Democrats, they not only are fine with crucifying Jesus, they’ll stick Him in a jar of urine while they do it.

Progressive liberals demanded that – back when America was STILL overwhelmingly Christian and believed in God – that in the cause of “free speech” we allow such vileness.

The Christianity of our founding fathers – and our very founding fathers themselves – – have been torn down in scorn. And so the Constitution based on that Christian worldview is the next casualty.

“I think we can say that the Constitution reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day, and that the Framers had that same blind spot. I don’t think the two views are contradictory, to say that it was a remarkable political document that paved the way for where we are now, and to say that it also reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.” — Barack Obama, Sept. 6, 2001

To me it is absolutely no surprise whatsoever that our first president to classify America as “a Muslim nation” prophetically declared the complete separation between America and its founding fathers and their Constitution a matter of FIVE DAYS before the very Islam that he would embrace and elevate to a status directly alongside Christianity would attack us.

The rise of Islamic State and the rise of Obama are hand-in-hand. The former could never have arisen without the latter.

The men who wrote our Constitution declared in their basis for it – the Declaration of Independence – that our rights come from God, not from any government. But that didn’t work for liberal Democrats who wanted sodomy-perversion marriage and sixty million murdered babies. So they agreed with the Nazis that there is “no sense of social order in the teachings if the irresponsible protagonist of the New Testament” and threw Christianity out. So that “social order” could be whatever THEY declared it to by exercising the same power of the human will that Hitler exalted.

Precisely what is it that our liberal-Democrat-hijacked public schools are teaching our children about our God or our culture that will provide a powerful force for them to fight for what is right and fight against what is wrong? Or to put it in Obama’s mocking terms, “Whose morality would we teach in the schools?” Do we teach the morality of an everlasting God or do we teach the constantly adapting Darwinian bug morality of Obama?

We are watching the world unravel from without even as we are watching our very cities unravel from within. Because this is a nation that stands for NOTHING that is transcendent just as Nazi Germany stood for nothing that was transcendent before us. And we rabidly reject the very NOTION of transcendence because it interferes with our adoration of homosexual sodomy erected upon our altar of sixty million murdered babies.

Kids in liberal Democrat public indoctrination centers aren’t being taught to revere our foundations – they have been taught to mock and despise them.

Hey, if you like violence you’ll LOVE Islamic State. Why not join up and spread the love? You can burn and loot and murder to your heart’s content.

In the rise of Islamic State, we are watching what the liberal-Democrats of Hollywood created: a culture of violence that stands for NOTHING BUT DEATH act out its “values.”

I keep seeing snippets of the numerous videos that Islamic State recruiters are spreading all over the internet. And you know what I keep seeing? I keep seeing a video game. The Islamic State videos look just like what I see when I see the snippets of the video games that liberal Democrats of Hollywood and Silicone Valley pumped into our kids’ brains.

Hey, kids! You can live our your video game fantasies! Join Islamic State and you can actually BE in the video game world!

And why not? Why shouldn’t you? I mean, murder isn’t really all that “wrong” given that we’ve murdered sixty million babies and that’s “right,” right? And the same intolerant Christian God who says murder is wrong also says homosexuality is wrong and we ALL know that’s right, right? And I mean, seriously, whose version of Christianity are we going to teach? Whose passages of Scripture should guide our public policy?

Come on, why not try the Qur’an instead, kids? I mean, after all, this IS a Muslim nation, you know.

It doesn’t matter HOW you slice it: it comes up Obama and the vicious failure of liberal progressive Democrat Party ideology.

What I’m saying here is that the fact that for all practical purposes, Barack Obama and the Democrat Party have completely surrendered to radical Islam – whether you talk about Obama allowing and even outright encouraging Islamic State to spread by a) doing NOTHING in the Syria that now thanks to Obama controls more than half of that country and b) Obama’s completely cutting-and-running from Iraq in abandonment of EVERYTHING our generals demanded we do to preserve the security of that country; or whether you talk about Obama allowing and even outright encouraging Iran to develop a nuclear bomb and the ballistic missile system to deliver it and therefore encourage nuclear proliferation in the remaining Muslim countries as they talk about their bomb – the real crisis was already present and already metastasizing in our culture.

Islamic State is rising. And neither so-called “moderate Islam” itself or the defiled formerly “One Nation Under God” America that is now “God Damn America” have anything to fight it with.

Which is why the once greatest nation in the history of the world – a nation that uniquely called upon the God of the Bible – will go down so hard, so violently, in such an ugly, awful manner.

It’s funny. Progressive liberals claim to be anti-rape, but as a direct result of their moral system, we have seen rapes and sexual assaults SKYROCKET. And I’m sure it’s a complete surprise to you, unless you first consider that it’s kind of obvious that the inevitable result of teaching children that they are NOT created in the image of God, that they WILL act like the animals their teachers claim they are. I mean, Muslims love to slander Jews by labeling them “the descendants of apes and pigs.” But according to evolutionary theory we are that and worse: the descendants of flies and roaches. And surprise, surprise that our kids would start acting like what liberal progressives have said they are all along.

To the extent that the economy or jobs has anything to do with the rise of terrorism and the Islamic State, as liberal progressives keep telling us, again, look no farther than at THEM for producing the miserable economy and the awful jobs performance.

The beast is coming. And he is coming because liberal progressives have “fundamentally transformed” America into a nation that WILL NOT reflect the image of a good God, but will rather exalt their will over Him. Which is a prescription for judgment and doom.

“Think about how things have changed since 2008. Back then, I was the young tech-savvy candidate of the future,” Obama said. “Now I’m yesterday’s news and Hillary has got a server in her house.”

“I didn’t even know you could have one of those in your house,” he continued. “I am so far behind. Did you know that? I would have gotten one.”

As Obama’s joke rather crystal-clearly demonstrates, it’s not NORMAL to have a private server in your home. It’s way, WAY, WAY beyond abnormal. It takes world-class chutzpah to do something like this when you’re masquerading as a senor-level “public servant” (which under Obama means another way to say “lord and master”).

Hillary Clinton isn’t “tech-savvy.” She’s just an old pathologically dishonest and corrupt political shrew with a multi-multi–MULTI-million dollar slush fund to buy tech-savvy people to pull this crap for her so she can wheel and deal with your money using the very latest in criminal thug technology.

Of course, what this also proves is that as corrupt and as dishonest as Barack Obama has proven himself to be, even our current resident Liar-in-Chief is just no Slick Willy. As giant of a liar and cheat as Barack Obama’s cancerous presidency has been, even HE can only dream of attaining the level of corruption that the Clinton’s have degenerated into in their forty-plus years as political whores.

You can’t blame Obama for not ever thinking of installing a private server to hide your internet tracks. I mean, How many of us ever thought of that? Because in the entire history of the republic, NO public official has EVER had their own email server in his/her home before. Rather, previous Secretary’s of State have used private email accounts such as provided by Yahoo or AOL. Which of course had control over and preserved all emails. Simply far too much transparency for a pathologically dishonest shrew like Hillary Clinton.

A recent article shows us why Hillary installed her very own personal email server and then purged a massive percentage of her emails and ONLY released the rest after YEARS of vetting by her handpicked staff of priestesses. The following article ran in the print edition of the California Section of the Los Angeles Times under the title, “Emails tie Sony, Ridley-Thomas” (for the official record, Ridley-Thomas is a career Democrat). Hillary Clinton set up her own private server and purged tens of thousands of her emails so she wouldn’t open the newspaper to see this sort of story about HER criminality:

When Michael Lynton, chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures Entertainment, sat down for lunch last July with L.A. County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, each wanted something.

Lynton is a trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which needed Ridley-Thomas’ support to secure $125 million in county funding for a major expansion.

Ridley-Thomas wanted Sony to donate to a “super PAC” he had founded, which was supporting an aide’s campaign for a seat on the Los Angeles school board.

In September, Sony wrote a check to the PAC for $25,000. Two months later, Ridley-Thomas joined in a unanimous vote by the county supervisors to fund the LACMA expansion.

The lunch meeting, the PAC donation and discussions surrounding them are described in internal Sony emails, which were stolen by hackers and recently posted online by WikiLeaks. The Times reviewed the emails in collaboration with ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative newsroom.

The messages show how LACMA’s leadership courted Ridley-Thomas and how Sony, concerned about appearances, delayed the PAC contribution until a few weeks after the school board election.

A Sony official, Ridley-Thomas’ top aide and LACMA Director Michael Govan all said there was no connection between the contribution and the vote on county funding.

“We would never conduct ourselves in such a manner,” said Keith Weaver, Sony’s executive vice president for worldwide government affairs.

At the time, the museum was lobbying county officials for $125 million to help pay for a $600-million renovation and expansion of its Mid-Wilshire campus.

Govan, in an interview, recalled that in the months before the vote, he was confident he had the support of one county supervisor, Zev Yaroslavsky, but said he was “nervous” about the other four.

Among those, Ridley-Thomas was considered critical, Govan said. Other supervisors could be expected to defer to him because the new building would jut into his district.

Lynton also had a role to play in promoting the museum project. Sony’s studio complex in Culver City is in Ridley-Thomas’ district, and Lynton is “the only person on my board who had regular dealings with the supervisor,” Govan said.

According to the emails, Lynton held a meeting on May 21, 2014, with Weaver and Govan. The subject was Ridley-Thomas; the emails provide no further detail on the meeting.

Weeks later, Sony gave $5,000 to the PAC founded by the supervisor, campaign records show. Sony had made five previous contributions in the same amount since 2007.

In July, Lynton, Ridley-Thomas and two of their aides scheduled a lunch.

When Govan learned of the lunch, he sent two emails to Sony urging Lynton to press the LACMA matter.

The first message, sent to Weaver on July 16, the day before the lunch, and forwarded to Lynton, listed points to be made in support of the museum expansion and said that “this won’t happen if the Supervisor doesn’t support it.”

In the second message, Govan said the timing of the lunch was “perfect and critical.”

In separate emails to Lynton, Weaver noted that the Ridley-Thomas-founded PAC was spending heavily in support of the supervisor’s education advisor, Alex Johnson, in the Los Angeles school board race.

The PAC — the African American Voter Registration, Education and Participation Project — spent nearly $600,000 in support of Johnson’s campaign, according to state records. Johnson was seeking to represent District 1 on the L.A. Unified School District board.

There are no dollar limits on contributions to super PACs as there are for direct donations to candidates.

Vincent Harris, Ridley-Thomas’ chief deputy, said in an interview that the supervisor asked Lynton for a PAC contribution during the July 17 lunch. Harris said the LACMA funding was not discussed, adding that Ridley-Thomas knows better than to “mix fundraising with any public policy-related work.”

Weaver said he wasn’t sure if the group discussed the museum expansion.

After the lunch, Lynton had reservations about making another contribution to the PAC. According to emails between Lynton and Weaver, the Sony chief executive worried that a donation might create the appearance of a conflict because his wife, Jamie Alter Lynton, is executive editor of LA School Report, a news website that covers L.A. Unified.

Weaver wrote that he had talked with Ridley-Thomas’ office and asked for “options” for addressing Lynton’s concern. A few hours later, Weaver wrote Lynton outlining how to make “a direct contribution in a way that helps the effort, but avoids the perception/conflict issues.”

“You could contribute $25k AFTER the election,” he wrote in a message dated July 31.

That’s what Sony did, writing a $25,000 check that landed in the PAC’s coffers on Sept. 10, nearly a month after a school board runoff, which Johnson lost.

Campaign finance experts said that promising to make a donation and then timing it to delay public disclosure until after an election could be illegal, if there was an enforceable agreement between the two sides.

Stephen Kaufman, an attorney for the PAC, said that there was no such agreement, and that the PAC did not increase its spending during the school board race in anticipation of receiving a donation from Sony later.

Jim Sutton, a San Francisco-based attorney who has represented a number of prominent California politicians, said that even if the contribution doesn’t violate the letter of the law, it appears to violate the spirit of state statutes. “The purpose of the law is giving voters information about supporters before the election,” Sutton said.

Weaver declined to comment on the timing of the donation.

Asked why Sony gave the PAC more money than usual last fall, Weaver said: “There’s always a push for a year-over-year increase. This year we felt inclined to do so.”

Govan said he doesn’t believe there was any connection between the contribution and the supervisor’s support: “I know I’m being romantic, but I believe in politicians.”

In November, two days before the county supervisors were scheduled to vote on the LACMA project, Govan emailed Lynton with some good news.

This article was prepared in collaboration with ProPublica, where Faturechi is a reporter. Dolan is a Los Angeles Times staff writer

You see, Hillary avoided the mistake of Sony. She 1) installed her own personal server in her home; 2) purged all the emails that would have criminally convicted her; 3) had THE most dishonest and secretive and frankly thuggish administration in history run constant interference for her wrongdoing. I mean, there’s “not a shred of evidence” if all the actual evidence has been shredded. Which is EXACTLY what Hillary Clinton did with HER incriminating emails that she set up to have complete control over in spite of every rule of government accountability and oversight and appearance of wrongdoing and appearance of conflict of interests to the contrary.

While the organization, its officers and directors have not been found guilty of any allegations of wrong doing, and the government has not proven otherwise, our Board of Directors has decided that it does not help those who we seek to serve, and those who remain in need, for us to engage in a highly publicized, expensive, and distracting legal battle around our fundraising practices.

The silver lining in all of this is that the organization has the ability to continue operating our most valued and popular program, the Hope Supply. Our Board will work tirelessly to maintain the Hope Supply program services that have benefitted our many patients for years – initially under the TBCS banner as it transitions under a different organization – all with the goal of seamlessly providing services to you. I take solace in the fact that this wonderful program has the chance to continue operating.

I have loved leading TBCS and being part of a team that engaged heart and soul in helping to serve the mission of the charity selflessly, tirelessly, and honorably.

On behalf of TBCS, I want to thank you for allowing us to be a part of your lives. It is my hope that you will continue to find the resources and assistance you need through the soon-to-be revamped Hope Supply Program.

Giving back to the community is a mission that drives me. You will forever and always been in our hearts.

This from a guy who from all accounts only gave 2.7% of the millions he took in to the actual cancer patients. The rest went to himself, his family, his friends, and those he paid off to keep playing his games.

Excuse me while I fill the toilet bowl up to the rim with puke.

The Clinton, Inc. denials are about as hollow.

Here are some facts about the Clinton Foundation as a “charity” that Hillary Clinton was full-time pimping while simultaneously falsely serving America as Secretary of State:

The Clinton Foundation’s finances are so messy that the nation’s most influential charity watchdog put it on its “watch list” of problematic nonprofits last month.

The Clinton family’s mega-charity took in more than $140 million in grants and pledges in 2013 but spent just $9 million on direct aid.

The group spent the bulk of its windfall on administration, travel, and salaries and bonuses, with the fattest payouts going to family friends.

On its 2013 tax forms, the most recent available, the foundation claimed it spent $30 million on payroll and employee benefits; $8.7 million in rent and office expenses; $9.2 million on “conferences, conventions and meetings”; $8 million on fundraising; and nearly $8.5 million on travel. None of the Clintons is on the payroll, but they do enjoy first-class flights paid for by the foundation.

In all, the group reported $84.6 million in “functional expenses” on its 2013 tax return and had more than $64 million left over — money the organization has said represents pledges rather than actual cash on hand.

Some of the tens of millions in administrative costs finance more than 2,000 employees, including aid workers and health professionals around the world.

But that’s still far below the 75 percent rate of spending that nonprofit experts say a good charity should spend on its mission.

Charity Navigator put the foundation on its “watch list,” which warns potential donors about investing in problematic charities. The 23 charities on the list include the Rev. Al Sharpton’s troubled National Action Network, which is cited for failing to pay payroll taxes for several years.

Other nonprofit experts are asking hard questions about the Clinton Foundation’s tax filings in the wake of recent reports that the Clintons traded influence for donations.

“It seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund for the Clintons,” said Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, a government watchdog group where progressive Democrat and Fordham Law professor Zephyr Teachout was once an organizing director.

Gosh, the Clinton Foundation is exactly the same as the above cancer “charities.” The Clinton Foundation exists to benefit the Clintons, their family members (example, their daughter Chelsea and Hillary’s low-life brother), their friends (such as long-term Clinton crony Sidney Blumenthal), and those they paid off in exchange for more influence.

At best, this woman wants to be president and run the economy of the nation and the planet and she’s clearly not even competent to run a damn foundation. That if she’s NOT an outright criminal – which she sure is – who belongs in THE BIG HOUSE rather than the White House for her crimes.

But what can we do? Our national media is dominated by obvious propagandist hacks like George Stephanopoulos, incredibly a.k.a. ABC News’ chief political anchor when it was beyond obvious twenty freaking years ago that this guy was a biased turd rather than any kind of legitimate journalist. As one example all the media are falling all over themselves like a dozen puppies all trying to get to the food bowl at once whether Republicans would have still gone to war in Iraq “knowing what we know now.” How about asking every Democrat, “Would you still have cut-and-ran from Iraq and abandoned everything our troops sacrificed so much to win the way Obama did “knowing what you know now” about Islamic State now OWNING what we surrendered to them???

Maybe James T. Reynolds, Sr. or his corrupt kid should run for president and vice president on the Democrat ticket, given the Democrats love of fascist crooks.

Reading on page two of the main section of the May 14, 2015 edition of USA Today, I came across the following words from the article “Voices: Moral injury is also a war wound” by Gregg Zoroya, that screamed out at me:

The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that nearly one in four Americans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan developed post-traumatic stress disorder. The VA has treated 640,000 mental disorder cases from the wars, more than half of them PTSD.

Yet the science behind this disease that so emotionally paralyzes is still evolving and there is a heated debate among scientists.

Is it triggered purely by sudden, fear-based trauma to a sexual assault or an bomb explosion or the gathering of body parts of comrades from a battlefield?

Or is there a strain of PTSD, maybe a cousin of it, that has less to do with fear than with the ruthless disassembling of knowing what is right from what is wrong?

War is rife with good people feeling shame or guilt for what they did, whether it is opening fire on a car full of innocents because a driver fails to yield at a checkpoint, surviving combat while friends die or parsing the appropriate measure of abuse to pull confessions from an enemy.

Scientists are calling it moral injury. Former Navy psychiatrist William Nash, writing the introduction to Edmonds’ book, explains: “Moral injuries are wounds to beliefs and secondarily, to the identity of the person holding those beliefs, inflicted by events that violently contradict them.”

Nash, who today is director of psychological health for the Marine Corps, says, “We need to believe that the world is a good place; that we, ourselves, are good; and that our lives make sense somehow, that they are not just random chaos … Lose your grip on even one of (those assumptions) and it’s a long fall.”

And that’s PRECISELY what atheism and secular humanism amount to: “a long fall” into moral chaos and nihilism.

According to the Judeo-Christian worldview, God created the universe for man and created man as the capstone of His creation in His very own image (Genesis 1:26-27). Over and over again, God calls His creation – which amounts to His self-expression – as “good.” And He calls it good seven times (see Genesis 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31), reflecting the sevenfold perfection and completeness of God. Yes, there was a Fall, and man plunged into sin and creation itself was affected by this corruption. But it began as “good” and as the good work of a holy, morally perfect God.

We can view the world as fallen, yet still bearing the stamp of the divine, just as we can see the divine within ourselves. There IS good; we ourselves HAVE the capacity of goodness within ourselves; our lives DO make sense and are NOT just random chaos.

Now, consider the atheist/secular humanist worldview: how did it all get here? By nothing more than godless, random chaos. And we got here through a lengthy, random procession of chaos by which the most vicious, ruthless creature survived by killing off all the weaker or more inferior ones around it. Only if the law of the claw is “good” can we call ourselves “good.” On the story of atheistic evolution we can call ourselves “good” only because according to the results of atheistic evolution we proved to be better at wiping out all of our competitors than our competitors were at wiping us out in the struggle for survival. And we continue to be “good” only because we continue to be better at murdering and exterminating our competition than any other creature under the sun. Atheists are hypocrites who affirm “survival of the fittest” as a past fact only to claim to utterly renounce it as a present reality. So no, on the secular humanist story of evolution, we are NOT “good.” And do our lives make sense somehow? Again, NOT. Our lives mean NOTHING because we CAME from nothing and when we die we shall surely be NOTHING but the same meaningless dust of the ground that surrounds us. And there IS no ultimate purpose, no ultimate destiny not only for you but for your entire family, your entire race, your entire nation, your entire species and in fact the entire universe itself as it all ultimately grinds to an end when the same random process that spat us out ultimately swallows us back up again in cold, cosmic death and nothingness.

I keep saying it: true science and any true or legitimate understanding of humanity SCREAMS OUT THAT THERE IS A GOD.

And ANY view that refuses to acknowledge God is the religion of wicked fools that amounts to fatal “moral injury” to the human race.

I want you to read this article – which was actually a lecture delivered by William Lane Craig – and then reflect on the wisdom of this Marine psychologist who deals with reality rather than the empty philosophies and high-sounding nonsense of secular humanism:

This a topic that is most serious and somber: the absurdity of life without God.

Loren Eisley writes, “Man is the cosmic orphan.He’s the only creature in the universe who asks, ‘Why?’Other animals have instincts to guide them, but man has learned to ask questions: ‘Who am I?’‘Why am I here?’‘Where am I going?’”Ever since the Enlightenment, when men threw off the “shackles” of religion, man has tried to answer those questions without reference to God.But the answers that came back were not exhilarating, but dark and terrible: you are the accidental by-product of nature – the result of matter, plus time, plus chance.There is no reason for your existence; all you face is death.Modern man thought that when he got rid of God he freed himself from everything that stifled and oppressed him; instead, he found that in killing God, he had only orphaned himself.For if there is no God, then man’s life becomes, ultimately, absurd.If God does not exist, then both man and the universe are inevitably doomed to death.Man, like all biological organisms, must die.With no hope of immortality man’s life leads only to the grave.Compared to the infinite stretch of time, man’s life is but a brief infinitesimal moment; and yet this is all the life that he will ever know.And therefore every one of us must come face to face with what theologian Paul Tillich has called, “the threat of non-being.”For even though I know that now I exist, that now I am alive, I also know that someday I will no longer exist, that I will die.I will no longer be.And this thought is staggering and frightening; to think that the person I call I, myself, will no longer exist, that I will be no more.It is an overwhelming thought that the majority of us encounter first as children.Most of us simply grow to accept the fact, as we all learn to live with the inevitable.But the child’s insight of horror remains true.As the French existentialist, Jean Paul Sarte, observed, “Several hours or several years make no difference, once you have lost eternity.”

And the universe, too, faces a death of its own, scientists tell us that the universe is expanding, and the galaxies are growing further and further apart.As it does so it grows colder and colder as its energy is used up: eventually all the stars will burn out, and all matter will collapse into dead stars and black holes – there will be no light at all.There will be no heat.There will be no life.Only the corpses of dead stars and galaxies, ever expanding into the endless darkness, and the cold recesses of outer space – a universe in ruins.The entire universe marches irretrievably toward its grave.So not only is the life of each individual person doomed, the entire human race is doomed.The universe is plunging toward inevitable extinction; death is written throughout its structure.There is no escape.There is no hope.

If there is no God, then, man and the universe are doomed like prisoners awaiting execution; we await our inevitable death. There is no God. There is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself becomes ultimately absurd. It means that the life that we do have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose. Let’s look at each one of these.

First, there is no ultimate meaning without immortality and God. If each individual person passes out of existence when he dies, then what ultimate meaning can be given to his life? Does it really matter whether he ever existed or not? It might be said that his life was important because it influenced others or affected the course of history. But that shows only a relative significance to his life, not an ultimate significance. His life may be important relative to certain other events. But what is the ultimate significance to any of those events? If all of the events are meaningless, then what can be the ultimate significance of influencing any of them? Ultimately it makes no difference. Or look at it from another perspective: scientists say that the universe originated in a great explosion called ‘the Big Bang’ about 15 billion years ago. Suppose the Big Bang had never occurred: what ultimate difference would it have made? The universe is doomed to die anyway; in the end it makes no difference whether it ever existed or not. And therefore it is without ultimate significance. The same is true of the human race; mankind is a doomed race in a dying universe. Because the human race will eventually cease to exist, it makes no ultimate difference whether it ever did exist. mankind is thus no more significant than a swarm of mosquitoes or a barnyard of pigs, for their end is all the same: the same cosmic process that coughed them all up in the first place will eventually swallow them all up again. And the same is true of each individual person; the contribution of the scientists to the advance of human knowledge, the researches of the doctor to alleviate pain and suffering, the efforts of the diplomat to secure peace in the world, the efforts of good people everywhere to benefit the lot of the human race, all these come to nothing; in the end they don’t make one bit of difference. Not one bit. Each person’s life is therefore without ultimate significance. And because our lives are ultimately meaningless, the activities that we fill our lives with are also meaningless. The long hours spent in study at the university, our jobs, our interests, our friendships, all of these are, in the final analysis, ultimately meaningless. This is the horror of modern man. Because he ends in nothing, he ultimately is nothing.

But it’s important to see that its not just immortality that man needs if life is to be meaningful. Mere duration of existence does not suffice to make that existence meaningful. Man and the universe could exist forever, but if there were no God, that existence would still have no ultimate significance. To illustrate one science fiction short story told of a space traveler who was marooned on a barren chunk of rock lost in outer space. And he had with him two vials: one containing a potion that would give him immortality, and the other a poison to end his life. Realizing his hopeless predicament, he gulped down the vial of poison. And then, he had discovered to his horror, that he had drunk the wrong vial; he had swallowed the potion for immortality. And thus he was doomed to exist forever in a meaningless, unending life. Now if God does not exist, then our lives are just like that. They could go on, and on, and on, and still be utterly without meaning. We could still ask of life, ‘So what?’ So its not just immortality that man needs if life is to be ultimately significant. He needs God and immortality.And if God does not exist, then he has neither.

20th century man came to understand this fact. Read Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett; during this entire play two men carry on trivial, mind-numbing conversation, while waiting for a third man to arrive, who never does. And our lives are like that, Beckett is saying. We just kill time waiting – for what, we don’t know. In a tragic portrayal of man Beckett wrote another play – Breath – in which the curtain opens revealing a stage littered with junk. And for 30 long seconds the audience sits and stares in silence at that junk; and then the curtain closes. That’s all there is. The French existentialists Jean Paul Sarte and Albert Camus understood this as well. Sarte portrays life in his play No Exit as hell. The final line of the play are the words of resignation, “Well, let’s get on with it.” And thus Sarte writes elsewhere of the “nausea” of existence. Camus also saw life as absurd. At the end of his brief novel The Stranger, Camus’ hero discovers in a flash of insight that life has no meaning, and that there is no God to give it one. The French biochemist Jacques Monot seemed to echo these sentiments when he wrote in his work Chance and Necessity, “Man finally knows that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe.”Thus if there is no God, then life becomes ultimately meaningless.Man and the universe are without ultimate significance.

Secondly, there is no ultimate value without God and immortality. If life ends at the grave, then ultimately it makes no difference whether one has lived as a Stalin or as a saint since one’s destiny is ultimately unrelated to one’s behavior. You may as well just live as you please; as the Russian writer Dhostyevsky put it, “If there is no immortality, then all things are permitted.” On this basis a writer like Ayan Rand is absolutely correct to praise the virtues of selfishness. No one holds you accountable; you might as well simply live totally for self. Indeed, when you think about it, it would be foolish to do anything else since life is too short to jeopardize it by acting out of anything but pure self-interest. Sacrifice for another person would be stupid. Kai Nielson, an atheist philosopher, who attempts to justify the viability of ethics without God, in the end admits, “We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons, unhoodwinked by myth or ideology, need not be individual egoists or classical amoralists. Reason doesn’t decide here. The picture I have painted for you is not a pleasant one; reflection on it is depresses me. Pure practical reason, even with a good knowledge of the facts, will not take you to morality.”

But the problem becomes even worse. For regardless of immortality, if there is no God, then there can be no objective standard of right and wrong. All we are confronted with, in Jean Paul Sarte’s words, is “the bare, valueless fact of existence.” Moral values are either just expressions of personal taste, or else the by-products of socio-biological evolution and conditioning. In the word of one humanist philosopher, “The moral principles that govern our behavior are rooted in habit and custom, feeling and fashion.” In a world without God, who is to say whose values are right, and whose are wrong? Who is to judge that the values of an Adolf Hitler are inferior to those of a Mother Theresa? The concept morality loses all meaning in a universe without God. As one contemporary atheistic ethicist points out, “To say that something is wrong because it is forbidden by God is perfectly understandable to anyone who believes in a law-giving God. But to say that something is wrong, even though no God exists to forbid it, is not understandable. The concept of moral obligation is unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain, but their meaning is gone.” In a world without God, there can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative subjective judgments. But that means that it is impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil. Nor can one praise love, brotherhood, or equality as good. For in a universe without God, good and evil do not exist. there is only the bare, valueless fact of existence. And there is no one to say that you are right, and I am wrong.

Thirdly, there is no ultimate purpose without immortality and God. If death stands with open arms at the end of life’s trail, then what is the goal of life? To what end has life been? Has it all been for nothing? Is there no purpose at all for life? And what of the universe? Is it utterly pointless? If its destiny is but a cold grave in the recesses of outer space, then the answer must be yes. It is pointless. There is no goal, no purpose, for which the universe exists. The litter of a dead universe will just go on expanding and expanding forever. And what of man? Is there no purpose at all for the existence of the human race? Or will it simply peter out someday, lost in the indifference of an oblivious universe? The English writer H.G. Wells foresaw such a prospect. In his novel, The Time Machine, Wells’ time traveler journeys far into the future to discover the destiny of man. And all he finds is a dead earth except for a few lichens and moss orbiting a gigantic red sun. The only sounds are the rush of the wind, and the gentle ripple of the sea. “Beyond these lifeless sounds,” writes Wells, “the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All of the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives, all that was over.” And so, Wells’ time traveler returned. But to what? To merely an earlier point on the same purposeless rush towards oblivion. One reading this might exclaim, “No, no! It can’t end that way!” But this is reality in a universe without God. There is no hope; there is no purpose. Reflect on T.S. Elliot’s haunting lines:

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

And what is true of mankind as a whole, is also true of each of us individually. We are here to no purpose. If there is no God, then your life is not qualitatively different from that of a dog. That may sound harsh, but it’s true. As the ancient writer of Ecclesiastes put it, “For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same. As one dies so dies the other; indeed, they all have the same breath and there is no advantage for man over beast, for all is vanity. All go to the same place. All came from the dust and all return to the dust. (Ecc 3:19-20). In this book that reads more like a piece of modern existentialist literature than a book from the Bible, the writer demonstrates the futility of pleasure, wealth, education, political fame, and honor, in a life doomed to end in death. His verdict? “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” (Ecc 12:8). If life ends at the grave, then we have no ultimate purpose for living.

But more than that, even if life did not end in death, without God life would still be without purpose. For man and the universe would then be mere accidents of chance thrust into existence for no reason. Without God the universe is a result of a cosmic accident, a chance explosion. There is no reason for which it exists. And as for man, he’s nothing but a freak of nature, a blind product of matter, plus time, plus chance. There’s no more purpose in life for the human race than for a species of insect – for both are the result of the blind interaction of chance and necessity. As one philosopher has put it, “Human life is mounted upon a sub-human pedestal, and must shift for its self alone, in the heart of a silent and mindless universe.” And what is true of the universe and of the human race is also true of us as individuals. We are here to no purpose. We are the results of certain combinations of heredity and environment. We’re victims of a sort of environmental roulette. Psychologists following Sigmund Freud tell us that our actions are really the result of repressed sexual tendencies. Sociologists following B.F. Skinner argue that all of our choices are really determined by conditioning so that freedom is an illusion. Biologists like Francis Crick regard man as an electro-chemical machine which can be controlled by altering its genetic code. If God does not exist, then you are just a miscarriage of nature, thrust into a purposeless universe to live a purposeless life. So if God does not exist, that means that man and the universe exist to no purpose (since the end of everything is death), and that they came to be for no purpose (since they are only blind products of chance). In short, life is ultimately without reason.

Do you understand then the gravity of the alternatives before us? For if God exists, then there is hope for man. But if God does not exist, then all we are left with is despair. Do you understand why the existence of God is a question that is so vital to man? As one writer has aptly put it, “If God is dead, then man is dead too.” Unfortunately, the mass of people do not understand this fact. They continue on as though nothing had changed. Consider the story told by Frederick Nietzsche of The Madman, who in the early morning hours burst into the marketplace, lantern in hand, crying, “I seek God! I seek God!”Since many of those standing about did not believe in God, he provoked much laughter.‘Did God get lost?They yelled.Or, is He hiding?Or, perhaps He’s gone on a voyage, or emigrated!And thus they yelled and laughed and taunted the madman.And then, Nietzsche writes, the madman turned in their midst and pierced them with his eyes.“Whither is God?” he cried.“I shall tell you!We have killed him!You and I!All of us are His murderers!But how have we done this?How were we able to drink up the sea?Who gave us the sponge to wipe up the entire horizon?What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun?Whither is it moving now?Away from all suns?Are we not plunging continually backward, sideward, forward in all directions?Is there any up or down left?Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?Do we not feel the breath of empty space?Has it not become colder?Is not night and more night coming on all the while?Must not lanterns be lit in the morning?Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God?God is dead!And we have killed Him!How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?”The crowd stared at the madman in silence and astonishment.At last he dashed his lantern to the ground.“I have come too early!”He said.“This tremendous event is still on its way.It has not yet reached the ears of men.”People did not truly comprehend what they had done in killing God.And yet, Nietzsche predicted that some day, people would realize the implications of atheism, and this realization would usher in an age of nihilism that is the destruction of all meaning and value in life.“This most gruesome of guests”, he said, “is standing already at the door.Our whole European culture is moving for some time now with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade as toward a catastrophe, restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.”Most people still do not reflect upon the consequences of atheism, and so, like the crowd in the marketplace, go unknowingly on their way.And yet, when we realize, as did Nietzsche, what atheism really implies, then his question presses hard upon us: “How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?”

About the only solution which the atheists can offer is that we just face the absurdity of life bravely and live valiantly. Bertrand Russell, for example, wrote that “we must build our lives upon the firm foundation of unyielding despair. Only by recognizing that the world really is a terrible place can we successfully come to terms with life.” Camus said that we should honestly recognize life’s absurdity and then live in love for one another.” But the fundamental problem with this solution is that it is simply impossible to live consistently and happily within the framework of such a world view. If one lives consistently, he will not be happy. If he lives happily, it is only because he is not consistent. Francis Schaeffer explained this point well, saying, “Modern man lives in a two-story universe. In the lower story is the finite world without God. Here life is absurd (as we have seen). In the upper story are meaning, value, and purpose. Now modern man lives in the lower story because he believes that there is no God. But because he cannot live consistently and happily in such a world, he therefore makes leaps of faith into the upper story to affirm that life has meaning, value, and purpose, even though he has absolutely no right to since man and the lower story does not believe in God. Modern man is totally inconsistent to make this leap because these values cannot exist without God, and man and the lower story does not have God.”

Let us look again, then, at each of those three areas in which we saw that life was absurd without God, to show how modern man cannot live consistently and happily with his atheism.

First, the area of meaning. We saw that without God life has no ultimate meaning. And yet, philosophers continue to live as though life were meaningful. For example, Sarte argued that one may create meaning for his life by freely choosing to follow a certain course of action. Sarte, himself, chose Marxism. Now this is utterly inconsistent. It is inconsistent to say that life is objectively meaningless and then to say that one can create meaning for his life. If life really is absurd, then man is trapped in the lower story. To try to create meaning in life represents a leap to the upper story. But Sarte has no basis for this leap. Without God, there can be no objective meaning in life. Sarte’s program is thus actually an exercise in self-delusion – for the universe doesn’t really acquire a meaning just because I happen to give it one. This is obvious. For suppose you give the universe one meaning, and I give it another. Who is right? Well, the obvious answer is neither one. For the universe without God remains objectively meaningless no matter how we happen to regard it. Sarte is really saying, ‘Let’s pretend that life and the universe have meaning.’ And that is just fooling yourself. The point is this: if God does not exist, then life is objectively meaningless. But man cannot live consistently and happily as though life were meaningless. And so in order to be happy, he pretends that his life has meaning. But this is of course utterly inconsistent; for without God, man and the universe remain without any real significance.

Turn now to the problem of value.Here is where the most blatant inconsistencies occur.First of all, atheistic humanists are totally inconsistent in affirming the traditional values of love and human brotherhood.Camus has been rightly criticized for inconsistently holding both to the absurdity of life, on the one hand, and to ethics of human love and brotherhood on the other.The two are logically incompatible.Bertrand Russell, too, was inconsistent.For although he was an atheist, he was also an outspoken social critic, denouncing war and restrictions on sexual freedom.Russell admitted that he could not live as though ethical values were simply a matter of personal taste and that he therefore found his own views, and I quote, “incredible.”“I do not know the solution,” he confessed.The point is that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong do not exist.As Dhostovesky said, “All things are permitted.”But Dhostovesky also showed that man cannot live this way.He cannot live as though as though it’s perfectly all right for soldiers to slaughter innocent children.He cannot live as though it’s perfectly acceptable for dictatorial regimes to follow systematic pograms of physical torture of political prisoners.He cannot live as though its all right for dictators like Stalin or Pol Pot to ruthlessly exterminate millions of their own countrymen.Everything in him cries out to say that these acts are wrong, really wrong.But if God does not exist, then he cannot.And so, he makes a leap of faith to affirm values anyway.And when he does, he reveals the inadequacy of a world without God.

The horror of a world devoid of value was brought home to me with new intensity several years ago as I viewed a BBC television documentary called “The Gathering.” It concerned the reunion of certain survivors of the Holocaust in Jerusalem where they shared experiences and rediscovered lost friendships. Now I had heard stories of the Holocaust before and even visited camps like Dachau and Buchenwald. And I thought I was beyond being shocked by further tales of horror. But I found that I was not. One woman prisoner, for example, a nurse, told how she was made the gynecologist at Auswitzch. She observed that certain pregnant women were grouped together by the soldiers under the direction of Dr. Mengele, and housed in the same barracks. Some time passed and she noticed that she no longer saw any of these women. She made inquirees: “Where are the pregnant women who were housed in that barracks?” she asked. “Oh, haven’t you heard,” came the reply, “Dr. Mengele used them for vivisection.” Another woman told how Mengele had had her breast bound up so she could no longer suckle her baby. The doctor wanted to learn how long an infant could survive without nourishment. And desperately this poor woman tried to keep her baby alive by giving it bits of bread soaked in coffee. But to no avail. Each day the baby lost weight – a fact which was eagerly monitored by Dr. Mengele. Finally a nurse then came secretly to this woman, and said to her, “I’ve arranged for a way for you to get out of here. But you cannot take your baby with you. I’ve brought a morphine injection which you can give to your child to take its life.” And when this woman protested the nurse said to her, “Look, your baby is going to die anyway. At least save yourself.” And so this poor woman took the life of her own child. Mengele was furious when he learned he had lost his experimental specimen, and he searched among the corpses of the discarded babies until he could find the body to have one last weighing.

My heart was torn by these stories.One rabbi who survived Auswitzch summed it up well when he said “It was as though a world existed in which all of the Ten Commandments had been reversed: Thou shalt kill, thou shalt lie, thou shalt steal, and so forth.Mankind has never seen such a hell.”And yet, if God does not exist, then our world IS Auswitzch.There is no absolute right and wrong.All things are permitted.But no atheist, no agnostic, can live consistently with such a view.Nietzsche himself, who proclaimed the necessity of living beyond good and evil, broke with his mentor, Richard Waugner, precisely over the issue of the composer’s strident German nationalism and anti-Semitism.Similarly, Sarte, writing in the aftermath of the second World War, condemned anti-Semitism.He declared that a doctrine that leads to extermination is not merely an opinion or a matter of personal taste of equal value with its opposite.In his important essay, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” Sarte struggled vainly to elude the contradiction between his denial of divinely pre-established values in his urgent desire to affirm the value of human persons.He could not live with the implications of his own denial of ethical absolutes.

A second problem is that if God does not exist and there is no immortality, then all the evil acts of men go unpunished.And all the sacrifices of good people go unrewarded.But who can live with such a view?Richard Wombrandt, who was tortured for his faith in communist prison, wrote, “The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe when man has no faith in the reward of faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil.There is no reason to be human.There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man.The communist torturers often said, ‘There is no God.There is no hereafter.No punishment for evil.We can do what we wish!’I have even heard one torturer say, ‘I thank God in whom I don’t believe that I have lived to this hour when I can express all of the evil in my heart.’He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners.”

The English theologian Cardinal Newman once said that, “If I believed that all of the evils and injustices of life throughout history were not to be made right by God in the afterlife, why, I think I should go mad.”Rightly so.And the same applies to acts of self-sacrifice.A number of years ago a terrible mid-winter air disaster occurred in Washington, D.C.A plane leaving Dulles Airport smashed into a bridge spanning the Potomac River, plunging its passengers into the icy waters.And as the rescue helicopters came attention was focused on one man, who again and again pushed the dangling rope ladder to other passengers rather than be pulled to safety himself.Six times he passed the ladder by, and then when the helicopters came again, he was gone.He had freely given his life so that others might live.The entire nation turned its eyes on this man with respect and admiration for the selfless and good act that he had performed.And yet if the atheist is right, that man was not noble; why he did the stupidest thing possible.He should have gone for the rope ladder first, pushed others out of the way if necessary in order to reach it.But to give his own life for other people for whom he had never even known, all the life he would ever have, what for?For the atheist there can be no reason.And yet the atheist, like the rest of us, instinctively reacts with praise for this man’s selfless action.Indeed I think one will never find an atheist who lives consistently with his system.For a universe without moral accountability and devoid of value is unimaginably terrible.

Finally let’s look at the problem of purpose in life. The only way that most people who deny purpose in life manage to live happily is either by making up some purpose for their lives, which amounts to self-delusion, as we saw with Sarte, or else by not carrying out their view to its logical conclusions. Take the problem of death, for example. According to psychologist Ernst Block, the only way that modern man lives in the face of death is by sub-consciously borrowing the belief in immortality which his forefathers held to. Even though he himself no longer has any basis for this belief, since he does not believe in God. Block states that the belief that life ends in nothing is hardly (in his words) sufficient to keep the head high and to work as if there were no end. The remnants of a belief in immortality, writes Block, modern man does not feel the chasm that unceasingly surrounds him, and will most certainly engulf him at last. Through these remnants he saves his sense of self-identity. Through them the impression arises that man is not perishing, but only that one day the world has the whim no longer to appear to him. Block concludes, “This quite shallow courage feasts on a borrowed credit card; it lives from earlier hopes and the support that they have once provided.” But modern man no longer has any right to that support, since he rejects God. But in order to live purposefully, he makes a leap of faith to affirm a reason for living.

We often find the same inconsistency among those who say that man and the universe came to exist for no reason or purpose but just by chance.Unable to live in an impersonal universe in which everything is the result of blind chance these people begin to ascribe personality and motives to the physical processes themselves.It’s a bizarre way of speaking – and it represents a leap from the lower to the upper story.For example, the brilliant Russian physicist, Zodovitzchen Novakoff, in contemplating the universe, asks, “Why did nature choose to create this universe rather than another?”‘Nature’ here has obviously become a sort of ‘God substitute,’ filling the role and function of the Creator.Similarly, Francis Crick, halfway through his book “The Origin of the Genetic Code” begins to spell ‘nature’ with a capital ‘N’ – and speaks of natural selection as being “clever” and “thinking” of what it will do.similarly Fred Hoyle, the English astronomer, attributes to the universe itself the properties of God.For Carl Sagan, the cosmos, with which he always spelled with a capital letter, obviously fulfills the role of a God-substitute.Though all of these men profess not to believe in God, they smuggle in a God-substitute through the back door because they cannot bear to live in a universe in which everything is the result of impersonal forces.

And it’s interesting to see many thinkers betray their views when they are pushed to the logical conclusions.For example, feminists have raised a storm of protest over Freudian sexual psychology because, they say, its chauvinistic and degrading to women.And, some psychologists have nuckled under and revised their theories.Now this is totally inconsistent.If Freudian psychology is really true then it doesn’t matter if its degrading to women.You can’t change the truth because you don’t like what it leads to.But the problem is that people can’t live consistently and happily in a world where other persons are devalued.And yet, if God does not exist, then nobody has any value.The only way you can consistently support women’s rights is by belief in God.For if God does not exist, women have no more rights than a female goat or a chicken has rights.In nature, whatever is, is right.IfGod does not exist, then natural selection dictates that the male of the species is the dominant and aggressive one.In nature, whatever is, is right.But who can live with such a view?Apparently not even Freudian psychiatrists who betray their theories when pushed to their logical conclusions.

Or take the sociological behaviorism of a man like B.F. Skinner.This view leads to the sort of society envisioned by George Orwell in his novel “1984,” where the government controls and programs the thoughts of everybody.If Pavlov’s dog can be made to salivate when a bell rings, so can a human being.And if Skinner’s theories are right, there can be no objection to treating people like the rats in Skinner’s rat boxes – they run through their mazes coaxed on by food an electric shocks.According to Skinner all our actions are programmed anyway.And if God does not exist, then no moral objection can be raised against treating people like human guinea pigs – because man is not qualitatively different from a rat.For both are the result of matter, plus time, plus chance.But again who can live with such a dehumanizing view.

Or finally take the biological determinism of a man like Francis Crick.The logical conclusion is that man is like any other laboratory specimen.The world was horrified when it learned that in camps like Dachau and Auswitzch the Nazis had used prisoners for medical experiments on living human beings.But why not?If God does not exist there can be no moral objection to using people as human guinie pigs.A memorial at Dachau says, “Nie vida,” never again.But this sort of thing continued to go on.It was recently revealed, for example, that in the United States after the war certain minority group persons where injected unbeknownst to them with a sterilization drug by medical researchers.Must we not protest that this is wrong?That people are more than just electro-chemical machines?The end of this view is population control, in which the weak and the unwanted are killed off to make room for the strong.But the only way that we can protest this consistently is if God exists.Only if God exists can there be purpose in life.

The dilemma of modern man is thus truly terrible. And in so far as postmodern man (so called) denies the existence of God and the objectivity of value and purpose, this dilemma remains unrelieved for postmodern man as well. Indeed it is precisely the awareness that modernism issues inevitably in absurdity and despair that constitutes the anguish of postmodernism. In some respects postmodernism simply is the awareness of the bankruptcy of modernity. The atheistic world is insufficient to sustain a happy and consistent life. Man cannot live consistently and happily as though life were ultimately without meaning, value, and purpose. If we try to live consistently within the framework of the atheistic view, then we shall find ourselves profoundly unhappy. If we manage to live happily, it is only by giving lie to the worldview of atheism. Confronted with this dilemma, man flounders pathetically for some means of escape.

In a remarkable address to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science in 1991, Dr. LD. Rue, confronted with the predicament of modern man, boldly advocated that we deceive ourselves by means of some “noble lie” into thinking that we and the universe still have value.Claiming that the lesson of the last two centuries is that intellectual and moral relativism is profoundly the case, Dr. Rue muses that the consequences of such a realization is that one’s quest for personal wholeness or self fulfillment, and the quest for social coherence, become independent from one another.This is because on the view of relativism the search for self fulfillment becomes radically privatized.If each person chooses his own set of values and meaning, Rue says there is no final objective reading on the world for the self.There is no universal vocabulary for integrating cosmology and morality.If we are to avoid what he calls “the madhouse option,” where self fulfillment is pursued regardless of social coherence, and if we are to avoid what he calls “totalitarian option,” where social coherence is imposed at the expense of personal fulfillment, then, he says, we have no choice but to embrace some “noble lie” that will inspire us to live beyond our selfish interests and so achieve social coherence.A noble lie, he says, is one that deceives us, tricks us, compels us beyond self interests, beyond ego, beyond family, nation, and race.It is a lie because it tells us that the universe is infused with value – which is a great fiction.Because it makes a claim to universal truth when there is none, and because it tells me not to live for self interest – which is evidently false.But, says Rue, without such lies, we cannot live.

This is the dreadful verdict pronounced over modern man.In order to live, he must live in self deception.But even the noble lie option is, in the end, unworkable.For how can one believe in these noble lies while at the same time believing in atheism and relativism?The more convinced you are of the necessity of a noble lie, the less you are able to believe in it.Like a placebo, the noble lie only works on those who believe it is the truth.Once we’ve seen through the deception, the lie has lost its power over us.And thus ironically, the noble lie cannot solve our human predicament for anyone who has come to see that predicament.The noble lie option only leads, therefore, at best, to a society in which an elitest group of Illuminati deceive the masses for their own good by perpetuating the noble lie.But then, why should those of us, who are enlightened, follow the masses in their deception?Why should we sacrifice self interests for a fiction?If the great lesson of the past two centuries is moral and intellectual relativism, then why, if we could, pretend that we do not know this truth and live a lie instead?If one answers, “Well for the sake of social coherence,” one may legitimately respond, “Why should I sacrifice my self interest for the sake of social coherence?The only answer the relativist can give to this question is that social coherence IS in my best interest.But the problem with this answer is that self interest and social coherence do not always coincide.My interest and the interest of the herd are not always the same.Beside, if out of self interest I do care about social coherence, the totalitarian option is always open to me.Forget the noble lie, and simply maintain social coherence, as well as my own self fulfillment, at the expense of the personal wholeness of the masses.Generations of Soviet leaders – who extolled proletarian virtues while they rode in limousines and dined on caviar on their country dachas – found this alternative quite workable.

Now, Dr. Rue would undoubtedly regard such an option as morally repugnant.But therein lies the rub; Rue’s dilemma is that he obviously values – deeply – both social coherence and personal wholeness for their own sakes.In other words, they are objective values – which according to his philosophy do not exist.He has already leaped to the upper story.The noble lie option thus affirms what it denies – and so refutes itself.

But if atheism fails in this regard, what about biblical Christianity? According to the Christian worldview, God does exist, and man’s life does not end at the grave. In the resurrection body man may enjoy eternal life and fellowship with God. And biblical Christianity therefore provides the two conditions necessary for a meaningful, valuable, and purposeful life: namely, God and immortality. Because of this, we can live consistently and happily. The Bible affirms that life is ultimately significant because we have eternal life which is the knowledge of God forever. This is the fulfillment of human existence, it is what we were made for. moreover, moral values are rooted in the nature of God Himself, and God’s moral commandments constitute for us our objective moral duties. Moreover the moral choices that we make in this life have an eternal significance because we will be held accountable for them by the holy God. The purpose of life, as the Westminster Catechism states, is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever. And thus biblical Christianity succeeds precisely where atheism breaks down.

Now, I want to be perfectly clear that none of this shows that biblical Christianity is true. But what it does show, I think, is to spell out clearly the alternatives. If God does not exist, then life is futile. If the God of the Bible does exist, then life is meaningful. Only the second of these two alternatives enables us to live consistently and happily.

And therefore it seems to me that even if these two options were absolutely equal, the rational person ought to choose biblical Christianity. That is to say, it seems to me positively irrational to prefer death, futility, and despair to hope, meaningfulness, and happiness. As Pascal said, “we have nothing to lose, and infinity to gain.” The cosmic orphan can come home.

No God means no meaning, no value and no purpose. Period. End of story. DEAL WITH IT.

I simply state it as a categorical fact: if there is no God, there is no “good.” And we ought to be pursuing the correct understanding of the ONLY kind of “good” we can be by murdering and raping one another as fast as we can until we stand on a mountain of skeletons as the Darwinian “fittest” specimen – having successfully killed off everything else around us.

ANY understanding of Islam that does not accurately and honestly reflect the murderous, vicious life of the Prophet Muhammad is a perversion and a lie of history. And it is refuted by history and by reality no matter how sincere the perverter of history’s motives might be to fabricate a religion that avoids the murderous viciousness of its founder and Prophet.

We are seeing hell on earth unleashed by those who would follow in the example of the Prophet Muhammad and his wicked religion of Islam. And the people who are carrying out that hell are the most faithful adherents of how Muhammad lived his own life and commanded his followers to live their lives.

And it is the identical same way with atheism and secular humanism. These worldviews are one thing and one thing only: a boot stamping on a human face forever.

I recall a haunting quote from a man who experienced the direct result of atheism and its ramifications:

If we present man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present him as an automation of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instincts, heredity, and environment, we feed the despair to which man is, in any case, already prone. I became acquainted with the last stages of corruption in my second concentration camp in Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment—or, as the Nazis liked to say, of ‘Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.—Viktor E. Frankl, Holocaust survivor and Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry, University of Vienna Medical School; from his book, The Doctor and the Soul

Ideas have consequences. And the consequences of atheism and secular humanism are hell on earth. FAR more people have died – and died miserably and without any dignity whatsoever – as the result of communism (I.e. official state atheism) than have died as the result of every other worldview COMBINED.

Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Chairman Mao and the worst mass murderers of history were ALL self-acknowledged atheists and godless evolutionists. And their atheism entailed genocide on a scale that the human race had never so much as imagined prior to the rise of atheism as a legitimate worldview. And I simply defy any atheist or secular humanist to explain to me how Hitler, Stalin and Mao were “bad evolutionists” or “bad atheists” the way we would ascribe to someone who fails to live up to the teachings of Jesus (e.g. “the Sermon on the Mount”) as being “bad Christians.” I defy you to explain to me how evolution Darwinism proscribe the genocide of a competitor for the scarce resources that YOUR people want “in the struggle for life” (as Darwin himself called it in the title of his famous work).

Karl Marx’s international socialism and Adolf Hitler’s national socialism were both based on the new modern “science” of evolution. As I point out in a past article, Nazism was applied Darwinism for the very simple reason that Darwinism entails social Darwinism and if the theory is truly sound, we ought to live our lives by its obvious implications.

Do you want meaning? Do you want value? Do you want purpose? You WON’T find it in evolution unless you’re a pathological hypocrite who perverts the obvious, just as you won’t find “peace” in Islam unless you pervert the obvious truth about Muhammad and the world’s most intolerant religion that he fabricated and which enslaves a billion souls today.

We will not allow President Obama to bully Louisiana into accepting an expansion of Obamacare.

“We have rejected Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion in Louisiana because it would cost Louisiana taxpayers up to $1.7 billion over the next ten years and move nearly 250,000 Louisianians from private coverage to Medicaid.

“The disastrous rollout of Obamacare is a case in point that we don’t need top-down, one-size-fits-all federal mandates, and instead should continue to focus on health care solutions that make sense for Louisiana.

“Obamacare needs to be repealed. The dysfunction of the website and the President’s broken promises on being able to keep your health plan are just the tip of the iceberg in regards to the problems with this law.”

A number of governors, particularly in red states, have stood their ideological ground and chosen not to expand, citing concerns about the additional financial burden. The federal government will pay for 100% of the expansion for the first three years, then gradually reduce its subsidy to 90% by 2020.

Some governors have said that expansion would involve additional costs that they couldn’t afford and enlarge a program that they consider broken. In many states, however, various analyses show that states would stand to gain millions of dollars by expanding the program, at least initially.

The article I cite above detailing the collapse of the health delivery system in Kentucky begins:

LEXINGTON, Ky. — While Kentucky has gained national prominence as the only Southern state to fully embrace Obamacare, its hospitals say the law has left them facing billions of dollars in cuts and forced them to lay off staff, shut down services and worry for their financial health and, in some cases, survival.

The Kentucky Hospital Association outlined its concerns in a report released Friday called “Code Blue,” saying payment cuts to hospitals are expected to reach nearly $7 billion through 2024. “Kentucky hospitals will lose more money under the Affordable Care Act than they gain in revenue from expanded coverage,” it said, experiencing a net loss of $1 billion by 2020.

“This report provides the real picture of what our hospitals are facing,” KHA President Mike Rust said during a press conference at the Lexington Convention Center, where the group was holding its annual convention. The Medicaid expansion has given many residents health coverage that has brought new money into hospitals, but “the rest of the story is the cuts.”

Hospitals are suffering a net loss, officials said, partly because about three-quarters of newly-insured Kentuckians signed up for Medicaid, which reimburses hospitals less than it costs to treat patients. Nationally, the Congressional Budget Office projected half of newly-insured patients would have private insurance. But Kentucky is a poor state, so most people who signed up for Obamacare — officially the Affordable Care Act — have qualified for expanded Medicaid, which covers those earning less than 138 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $33,000 for a family of four.

You just watch how the biased USA Today that wrote off Kentucky’s dilemma as being the result of being “a poor state” fails to understand how EVERY state will ultimately be a “poor state” under ObamaCare. As an example based on something called a “fact,” consider California. An article from Covered California – ObamaCare in California – touted that “495,073 people selected health plans during the open-enrollment period ending Feb. 22, 2015.” It points out the fact that “Nearly nine out of every 10 new enrollees qualified for some level of financial help for 2015,” which means that SOMEBODY ELSE is going to be forced to pay for them. But here’s the real point: versus those 495,073 people who signed up for ObamaCare by the deadline, “Meanwhile, more than 779,000 consumers enrolled in Medi-Cal from Nov. 15 through Jan. 31. Medi-Cal enrollment continues year-round.”

That means that as of March 5, Medicare accounted for 61% of the total ObamaCare coverage. And as the article points out, that enrollment continues and therefore continues to expand and grow – all year. Which means by the end of the year you can damn well bloody BET that the total of Medicare enrollees will be 3/4s of all ObamaCare enrollees. And nobody is calling California “a poor state.” Which is another way of saying that the CBO was dreadfully wrong in its horribly flawed analysis. ObamaCare is a depth charge that will sink and explode right in the bowels of our health care system and ultimately collapse it.

It’s kind of like that line from the movie Unforgiven where a hit man says of his victims, “Yeah, well, I guess they had it coming.” And Will Munny points out the far grimmer truth – “We all got it coming, kid.” Under ObamaCare, we’re ALL “poor states” now. And we’ve ALL got it coming to us.

Another article points out the devastation that ObamaCare has actually been to actual health care:

More than 214,000 doctors will not participate in new plans under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA).

According to a survey conducted this year by the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), a trade association comprised of multi-physician medical practices, “as many as 214,524 American physicians will not be participating in any ACA exchange products.” Reasons abound as to why, but, “chief among them is the fact that exchange plans are more likely to offer significantly lower reimbursement rates than private market plans, confusion among consumers about the obligations associated with high deductibles, and fear that patients will stop paying premiums and providers will be unable to recover their losses”

This is a staggering number, considering the Kaiser Family Foundation reported there are 893,851 active physicians working in the United States.

It’s actually WORSE than doctors merely withdrawing from networks and refusing to provide treatment that would bankrupt them to provide as they lose money with every patient until they are out of business. Doctors are getting out of medicine altogether as the Washington Times documented as early as 2013:

Doctors say emergency room visits have increased since the advent of Obamacare, undercutting one of the key selling points of President Obama’s health care law, which was supposed to ensure a healthier population by pushing consumers to rely on their primary physicians rather than emergency trips to the hospital.

Three out of four ER doctors said they have seen a rise in the number of patients since January 2014, when Obamacare fully kicked in, according to a survey conducted by the American College of Emergency Physicians. More than a quarter of the doctors said they have seen a major surge, and 47 percent said the rise has been slight.

The doctors said they fear a spike in visits could overwhelm their resources: Seven out of 10 said their departments aren’t prepared for a significant increase in patient volume.

The biggest cause is a lack of primary care doctors to treat the increased number of patients with health care coverage, so the patients are turning to the emergency room instead — exactly what wasn’t supposed to happen.

And these stories were personal for me, because I remember my mother worrying about how she was going to deal with her finances when she got very sick. I remember the fear Michelle and I felt when Sasha was a few months old and she got meningitis. And we raced to the hospital and they had to give her a spinal tap. And we didn’t know what was wrong and we were terrified, never felt so scared or helpless in all of my life. But we were fortunate enough to have good health insurance.

And I remember looking around that emergency room and thinking — what about the parents who aren’t that lucky? What about the parents who get hit with a bill of $20,000 or $30,000 and they’ve got no idea how to pay for it? What about those parents whose kids have a chronic illness like asthma and have to keep on going back to the emergency room because they don’t have a regular doctor, and the bills never stop coming? Who is going to stand up for them?

All told, since I signed the Affordable Care Act into law, we have seen the slowest growth in health care costs on record. (Applause.)

[…]

Right? Now, the reason we do that is, when uninsured people who can afford to get health insurance don’t, and then they get sick or they get hit by a car, and they show up at the emergency room, who do you think pays for that?

AUDIENCE: We do.

THE PRESIDENT: You do, in the form of higher premiums. Because the hospitals, they’ve got to get their money back somehow. So if they’re treating somebody who doesn’t have health insurance, they jack up premiums for everybody who does have health insurance. It’s like a hidden tax of $1,000 per family every year who has got health insurance. So we’re saying that’s not fair. If you can afford to get health insurance, don’t dump the costs on us. The law also requires employers with more than 50 employees to either provide health insurance for your workers or pay a penalty.

So let me ask you Obama’s question with this twist: when ObamaCare forces millions of patients into the emergency rooms he falsely sold his ObamaCare as preventing from happening, WHO PAYS FOR IT??? Emergency room care is THE most cost-inefficient system there IS because it is designed to be for EMERGENCIES. And when you have a surgeon who is trained to deal with traumatic amputations dealing with a kid’s runny nose, you are bankrupting the system. You are forcing hospitals to close down or get rid of needed staff to stay in business.

And the ONLY people who have fought to keep people from having no other freaking option for health care but to go to the ermgency rooms that massively add to the cost burden of providing health care were REPUBLICANS who pointed out Obama’s lies.

The Affordable Care act is having a devastating impact on already strapped rural hospitals, playing a role in many of them shutting their doors, The Washington Post reports.

Forty-eight rural hospitals have closed since 2010 and 283 are in danger, the Post quotes the National Rural Health Association as saying. Most of the shuttered hospitals are in the South.

Other factors are contributing to the problem, but Obamacare is cited as the main reason. The law reduced Medicare payments and how much hospitals are paid for uninsured patients.

The law assumed states would increase Medicaid to cover the gap, but many states did not.

Another factor caused by Obamacare: insurance plans with deductibles so high that people opt to skip some care they previously received. Fewer visits mean less revenue.

As goes ObamaCare, so goes the nation. That is because health care is one-sixth of the U.S. economy. And we are so economically weakened that you can’t collapse that one-sixth and not have the other five-sixths go into the toilet bowl with it.

Obama lied. He sold you the lie that having some piece of paper that said you have health insurance means you have health care even though his vile system has forced doctors out of the networks, forced them to leave medicine altogether, forced hospitals to close down, forced hospitals to fire key medical staff to stay open. He lied like a demon over and over and over again to sell you what he wanted to impose on you and damn the consequences of his lies. But we live in the last days before the coming of the beast, and these days are marked by deception and an outright hatred of and contempt for the truth. And so being right is actually a grave political liability these days.

Our economy is a sham. Our undemployment rate is an outright lie. Our unemployment rate is going down ONLY because of the dishonest way with which it is measured. It does NOT count people who are not working; it ONLY counts people who are actively seeking jobs and using state and federal agencies and benefits. Which is why we have the following state of affairs:

CHRIS WALLACE, FOX NEWS SUNDAY: We could continue this conversation and I’m sure we will, but let’s turn to the economy and some really disappointing numbers on the economy this week. Here they are. Only 126,000 jobs were added in March. That’s the weakest hiring in 15 months. Labor force participation dropped to 62.7 percent, matching the lowest since 1978. And the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta estimates first quarter growth at zero, zero percent, flat. George, what’s going on here?

GEORGE WILL, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Well, for the second year in a row they’ve blamed poor quarterly growth on insufficient global warming, that is on winter, on an unusually cold winter. Let your mind go back to November last year. There was job creation of 321,000 jobs and the administration said this is a miraculous achievement and a harbinger of things to come. It wasn’t a harbinger and it wasn’t miraculous. During the Reagan recovery there were 23 months of job creation over 300,000. Reagan had a month of job creation of 1 million and this was at a time when there were 75 million fewer Americans. Now, never mind zero growth. We are now being told really that two percent growth may be the new normal. If so, that’s a disaster because every day, today, yesterday, tomorrow, every day between now and 2030, 10,000 more baby boomers become eligible for Social Security and Medicare. If we have two percent growth, the crisis of the welfare state, the crisis of the private sector being able to throw off the revenues, to pay the bills for the promises we’ve made to ourselves becomes impossible.

WALLACE: Just tell again that the labor force participation stat that you have, if it were what it was at the beginning of the Obama administration.

WILL: If the workforce participation rate today were as high as it was on the day Barack Obama was inaugurated, the unemployment rate in this country would be 9.7percent, we wouldn’t be complaining about the bad recovery because we wouldn’t call it a recovery

But again, those are simply facts. And facts are the most useless things in modern America. Because we have become a bad, toxic, wicked people who prefer lies to the truth and who will not accept the truth.

We don’t have anywhere NEAR enough Americans working to support the massive and increasing-in-size tsunami of people who don’t have jobs and frankly don’t particularly care that much that they don’t have jobs because they’re parasites who demand and who have been trained by Democrats to demand that OTHER people support them even as they have been trained to blame and hate the very people who are supporting them.

Our economy is a shell game. We face debts that can’t even be compared to a mountain anymore, they are so massive and so high and steep and so staggering and so dangerous.

We hear our debt is $18 trillion now. Notwithstanding that Barack Obama was a truly demon-possessed hypocrite and slandering liar when he viciously attacked George Bush when it was nine trillion –

“The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents – #43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.” — Barack Obama, 3 July 2008

– our actual debt is so far beyond $18 trillion it’s not even FUNNY. Try this figure for size: $127 trillion (which is just unfunded liabilities and which doesn’t even bother to COUNT the $18 trillion):

The federal unfunded liabilities are catastrophic for future taxpayers and economic growth. At usdebtclock.org, federal unfunded liabilities are estimated at near $127 trillion, which is roughly $1.1 million per taxpayer and nearly double 2012’s total world output.

I submit that the actual figure is higher than that, northward of $222 trillion. We are a broken nation with a broken financial system covering up its nakedness with flimsy paper that will blow away on a cold day when the wind is howling and leave us with nothing but poverty and devastation and rioting such as the world has never seen.

We are a morally collapsed nation that will soon economically collapse and we will then see the true wickedness and greed and bitterness and hate come out that I see already present in this nation that was once based on “In God We Trust” as “one nation, under God” but now exists to glorify and worship homosexual sodomy and the murder by abortion of more than sixty million of our own most innocent Americans in the Holocaust-dwarfing abortion mills of the Democrat Party.

You read Romans chapter one and you tell me that the Barack Obama betrayal on marriage and the Democrat Party’s depraved homosexual SODOMY of the marriage that was instituted by GOD isn’t the trigger for God’s wrath against a sick society. If you bother to READ God’s Word, your only logical option if you want to defend the perversion of homosexuality is to stick your middle finger up at God and declare that you WELCOME His wrath on your head and on the heads of your children.

But that collapse isn’t merely going to be economic. We’re seeing that now, too.

Barack Obama has utterly failed to keep America safe from the threat of Islamic terrorism, even going to the insane extent of denying such a threat even EXISTS.

Now, as Obama’s spiritual mentor and former pastor for 23 years who infamously screamed “No, no, NO! NOT God bless America! God DAMN America!” once put it: “our chickens have come home to roost.”

We are FAR more vulnerable to jihadist terrorism than we have ever been thanks to Obama’s lies, thanks to his “JV Team” analogy that dismissed a clearly metastasizing threat to America, thanks to his “Osama bin Laden in dead and al Qaeda is on the run” lies.

I turn to yet another dismaying recent development: the shocking, catastrophic defeat that the United States is now suffering in Iraq and will almost certainly suffer soon in Afghanistan. Only a couple of years ago, our nation’s leaders were claiming credit for “decimating” al Qaeda and saying that the terrorists were on the run. Since 2010 there has been a 58% increase in the number of terror groups – and the number of jihadists have DOUBLED. Al Qaeda is larger, stronger and controls more territory than at any time in history. And an organization that is universally recognized as being even WORSE than al Qaeda – the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or ISIS – has now created the caliphate in the heart of the Middle East that Osama bin Laden dreamed of. Back in 2005, US intelligence captured a letter from the top al Qaeda leadership that put the aims of al Qaeda into four stages: 1) Drive America out of Iraq; 2) create a caliphate; 3) use that as a base to attack the United States and other countries; 4) attack Israel. And we have watched them succeed beyond all of the worst possible scenarios. They’re coming right back at us and we’re now far too weary, weak and divided to fight them.

There may be as many as thousands of people inside the United States consuming online “poison” from ISIS alone, and, “I know there are other Elton Simpsons out there,” FBI director James Comey warned today, referring to one of the men who opened fire outside of an event in Texas earlier this week celebrating artists’ portrayals of the Prophet Mohammad.

“We have a very hard task” in trying to identify and stop anyone inspired to launch an attack inside the U.S. homeland, Comey told ABC News’ Pierre Thomas and a small group of reporters.

Such efforts have become particularly challenging because ISIS has reconfigured and redefined terrorist recruitment, according to Comey. In fact, while the FBI is trying to find that so-called needle in a haystack, “increasingly the needles are invisible to us,” he said.

As recently as two years ago, someone in the United States who wanted to consume “radical poisonous propaganda” would have to seek that out on the Internet, most likely on a jihadist web forum. So the FBI focused its investigative efforts on those jihadist web forums, Comey said.

But “that has changed dramatically, especially with [ISIS] and their use of social media,” where on phones in people’s pockets they ask Americans and other foreigners “to travel to the so-called caliphate to fight” but simultaneously say, “If you can’t travel, kill where you are,” according to Comey.

“It’s almost as if there is a devil sitting on the shoulder saying, ‘Kill, kill, kill, kill’ all day long,” he said. “[They are] recruiting and tasking at the same time. … In a way, the old paradigm between ‘inspired’ and ‘directed’ breaks down here.”

And with that distinction “no longer relevant,” is it all the more challenging for the FBI to determine whether someone seeking jihadist propaganda online or even promoting themselves is “a talker or a doer,” as Comey described it.

And their talk is “fundamentally transforming” into ACTION to kill Americans wherever they are.

The official, who would speak about the continuing investigation only on condition of anonymity, said that although Mr. Simpson had long been under F.B.I. scrutiny, he had not appeared to be preparing for violence. “There are so many like him that you have to prioritize your investigations,” the official said.

The Secretary of Homeland Security’s sober warning:

Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said America is dealing with a “new environment” in which a lone-wolf terrorist could “strike at any moment.”

Johnson said, “We’re very definitely in a new environment, because of ISIS’s effective use of social media, the Internet, which has the ability to reach into the homeland and possibly inspire others.”

“Because of the use of the Internet, we could have little or no notice in advance of an independent actor attempting to strike.”

He added, “We’re very definitely in a new phase in the global terrorist threat where the so-called lone wolf could strike at any moment. Which is why the FBI, in my judgment, has done an excellent job of getting to those who are attempting to travel to Syria, who commit overt facts in furtherance of material support to terrorism. It is a new environment, but we are not discouraging Americans from doing the things that they do on a daily basis in our society.”

This is a pretense and a lie. We’ve had the Internet for quite a long time now, ever since another Democrat liar named Al Gore claimed he’d invented the damn thing about 20 years ago. This isn’t because of the internet any more than our godawful economy is the result of “inadequate global warming” a.k.a. winter; this is the result of an epic fail of a president who has placed FAR more resources into climate change than he has on the actual war while he literally claimed he’d WON the war that he claimed didn’t even exist in the first place.

Top U.S. officials and lawmakers on Sunday intensified concerns about the growing threat of jihad-inspired terror attacks against the United States, after last week’s attempt in Texas and the dire FBI warning that followed.

“I think there’s been an uptick in the stream of threats out there,” Texas GOP Rep. Mike McCaul, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, told “Fox News Sunday.” “We’re seeing these directives on almost a daily basis. It’s very concerning. Terrorism has gone viral.”

Do you know what I’ve noticed? I’ve watched snippets of the Islamic State’s recruiting videos as they’ve been presented on the news. And I’ve noticed a striking similarity to the violent video games that dominate our culture. The graininess, the colors, watching these Islamic State videos is like playing a video game. They’re beaming it into the heads of American kids who otherwise stand for nothing: you can actually LIVE your video game fantasies! Just picture yourself standing on a tank firing the machine gun, oh yes, guns a’blazing in a hail of glory. And they don’t give a flying damn if you kill for Allah or to live out your sick, twisted and violent video game fantasies. They just want blood.

And all Obama has been able to do is blame Christianity. After all, didn’t Christians do something like a thousand years ago? So why mention what Muslims did last night? Obama is a true moral coward who is only capable of pumping out moral equivocation to actually JUSTIFY jihadism for the wrongs we did to them notwithstanding the whole thousand-years-ago thing.

I have pointed out that the secular humanism of Barack Hussein Obama and the Democrat Party ultimately stand for NOTHING. They have no transcendent moral values and no transcendent beliefs worth fighting and dying for. They will negotiate and compromise and surrender because that’s all they have and all they ever WILL have.

And we’re seeing right now that the only people liberals WILL fight are their fellow Americans as they strive to incite every possible issue into a new reason to riot, to undermine America, to tear this nation apart on the basis of race, of gender, of sexual preference, of income class, of you name it, in their search for a political coalition that they can exploit toward more political power.

We’re going to collapse because God isn’t God if we DON’T collapse. We’re going to collapse because our vote for Obama, our vote for homosexual marriage, our vote for the murder of sixty million innocent babies, was a VOTE to collapse. We’re going to collapse because America isn’t IN Bible prophecy and either won’t exist or won’t be relevant in any way, shape or form in the last days. Because unlike any other nation, we once uniquely made a covenant with God and we broke that covenant and God is going to hold us to account for our betrayal. We’re going to collapse because the beast is coming.

But mark my words: we are GOING to collapse. And it will be entirely from within because it was from within and the depravity within our own hearts that we destroyed ourselves.

“Jesus replied, ‘Don’t let anyone mislead you, for many will come in My name, claiming, ‘I am the Messiah.’ They will deceive many. And you will hear of wars and threats of wars, but don’t panic. Yes, these things must take place, but the end won’t follow immediately. Nation will go to war against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in many parts of the world, as well as famines. But this is only the first of the birth pains, with more to come. “When these things begin to happen, watch out! You will be handed over to the local councils and beaten in the synagogues. You will stand trial before governors and kings because you are My followers. But this will be your opportunity to tell them about Me.'” — Mark 13:5-9

In this statement, Jesus predicted several things: He said 1) “Don’t let anyone mislead you, for many will come in My name, claiming, ‘I am the Messiah.’ They will deceive many.” 2) You will hear of wars and rumors of wars…” 3) Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom. 4) There will be natural disasters and famines like we’ve never seen. 5) And Christians will be handed over for official persecution by governments and by caliphates.

Jesus promised us that in the last days, many would come claiming to be Messiah. How many of these would be elected president of the United States???

Quoting David Axelrod, Senior Advisor to Obama, the man who marketed Obama to the world, David Axelrod: “He is the living, breathing apotheosis of the American melting pot,” enthused David Axelrod, who privately coined a nickname for his boss: “Black Jesus.”

Axelrod, as we know, isn’t alone. According to Klein, Micah Tillman, lecturer in philosophy at the Catholic University of America, called Obama “the Platonic philosopher king we’ve been looking for the past 2,400 years.” And no less an authority than Oprah has called him “The One.”

“You are the instruments that God is going to use to bring about universal change, and that is why Barack has captured the youth. And he has involved young people in a political process that they didn’t care anything about. That’s a sign. When the Messiah speaks, the youth will hear, and the Messiah is absolutely speaking.”

“Brothers and sisters,” Farrakhan said, “Barack Obama to me, is a herald of the Messiah. Barack Obama is like the trumpet that alerts you something new, something better is on the way.”

Farrakhan points out that the man Nation of Islam followers refer to as “the Saviour,” Fard Muhammad, had a black father and a white mother, just as Obama did.

“A black man with a white mother became a saviour to us,” he said. “A black man with a white mother could turn out to be one who can lift America from her fall.” — Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, speaking on ‘Nation of Islam Saviours’ Day’, February 24, 2008

“Dismiss it all you like, but I’ve heard from far too many enormously smart, wise, spiritually attuned people who’ve been intuitively blown away by Obama’s presence – not speeches, not policies, but sheer presence – to say it’s just a clever marketing ploy, a slick gambit carefully orchestrated by hotshot campaign organizers who, once Obama gets into office, will suddenly turn from perky optimists to vile soul-sucking lobbyist whores, with Obama as their suddenly evil, cackling overlord.

Here’s where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare. And this why he is so often compared to Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., to those leaders in our culture whose stirring vibrations still resonate throughout our short history.” — Mark Morford, SF Gate columnist, June 6, 2008

Newsweek editor Evan Thomas brought adulation over President Obama’s Cairo speech to a whole new level on Friday, declaring on MSNBC: “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.”

Thomas, appearing on Hardball with Chris Matthews, was reacting to a preceding monologue in which Matthews praised Obama’s speech: “I think the President’s speech yesterday was the reason we Americans elected him. It was grand. It was positive. Hopeful…But what I liked about the President’s speech in Cairo was that it showed a complete humility…The question now is whether the President we elected and spoke for us so grandly yesterday can carry out the great vision he gave us and to the world.”

The journey will be difficult. The road will be long. I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment – this was the time – when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals. Thank you, God Bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.

I could actually go on. But I believe I’ve made my case. Jesus was right. The Obama campaign played Obama as “the One,” as “the messiah,” as “Black Jesus,” as “sort of God, standing above the country, above the world.”

If you’re a Democrat, you already stand revealed as a proven Antichrist worshiper and it is only a matter of time when you fall in love with a new political god and worship him and take his mark on your right hand or on your forehead according to the prophetic description of how our political system will end in Revelation 13:16. I simply challenge you and defy you, Democrat, to show me anything even CLOSE to this coming from the Republican Party or any of it’s candidates. You show me this crap coming from Bush or McCain or Romney. You show me this or this or this.

You Democrats are literally TEN TIMES MORE MURDEROUS than Adolf Hitler or the Nazis. They murdered six million Jews in their death camps; YOU HAVE MURDERED SIXTY MILLION INNOCENT HUMAN BEINGS IN YOURS. And the day is coming when you will pay for your wickedness when God’s wrath washes over you as no tsunami wave as ever washed over anyone and carries you screaming into the hell you so richly deserve for your murder and your spirit of depraved perversion and your fanatic and criminal abuse of genuine justice.

Jesus was right as He described the last days and how they would come about as false messiahs demagogued their way to power and paved the way for the ultimate Antichrist who would lead the world to literal hell on earth during a seven-year period in which God gave a wicked people over to the demonic leader they truly deserved.

And we have seen The Rise, as Democrats proclaimed, “There is no God but Government, and Obama is Its Prophet!”

St. Paul described “the descent of man” into depravity as they first replaced God with godless evolution, professed themselves as wise when they were in reality becoming utter fools, and ultimately would become so toxic and so vile that they would do something that no culture on earth had ever done and exalt the perversion of homosexual sodomy as “marriage”:

Unbelief and Its Consequences

18For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, 19because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. 20For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. 21For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22Professing to be wise, they became fools, 23and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.

24Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. 25For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

26For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, 27and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.

28And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, 29being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, 30slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful; 32and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.

Jesus said that 2) we would hear more and more and more about wars and rumors of wars.

I was reading the Los Angeles Times this morning (Thursday, May 7, 2015) and here were the titles of the articles I saw as I looked through the main page:

Page A1: “Exercises signal NATO resolve against Russia”

Page A3: “Drug violence escalates: As elections approach, an army helicopter is shot down and a new cartel emerges”

Page A4: “4 to hang in Afghan mob killing: Eight are sentenced to prison in the beating and burning death of a woman”

Page A6: “Syrian president is ‘not worried’ despite setbacks” with the opening paragraph reading: “Syrian president Bashar Assad said Wednesday that he was “not worried” about the battlefield setbacks and exhorted supporters to avoid succumbing to “frustration” as the Syrian conflict rages on without an end in sight.”

The onslaught of recruitment propaganda has multiplied the number of online enthusiasts for the Islamic State in the United States, giving counterterrorism investigators the difficult task of deciding which are simply fantasizing in public and which might be planning violence.

“The ISIS guys are talking to these wannabes on Twitter all day long,” a senior law enforcement official said. “It’s like the devil is sitting on their shoulder saying, ‘Come on, they’re insulting the prophet, what are you going to do about it?’ ”

The official, who would speak about the continuing investigation only on condition of anonymity, said that although Mr. Simpson had long been under F.B.I. scrutiny, he had not appeared to be preparing for violence. “There are so many like him that you have to prioritize your investigations,” the official said.

The brief statement from the Islamic State did not claim that it had ordered the Texas attack, though it called the gunmen, Mr. Simpson, 30, and Nadir Hamid Soofi, 34, “two soldiers from the soldiers of the caliphate.”

The statement expressed hope that the men, who had been living in Phoenix, would be granted “the highest rank of paradise” and threatened that future action against the perceived enemies of Islam would be “worse and more bitter,” according to a translation by the Site Intelligence Group, which tracks extremist statements.

Those words, “There are so many like him” ought to chill your blood. Because of Obama’s monumental failure to do anything other than be a lying, slandering, deceiving demagogue rather than an actual leader, our system to deal with violence and terrorism and war is fundamentally and profoundly breaking down. The New York Times describes “Mr. Simpson, a convert to Islam with a long history of extremism.” The man had been tracked by authorities for years. But our liberal-dominated courts have made the system powerless to stop the avalanche of these murderers. The FBI is overwhelmed.

“I mean, the truth of the matter is that for all the challenges we face, all the problems that we have, if you had to be — if you had to choose any moment to be born in human history, not knowing what your position was going to be, who you were going to be, you’d choose this time. The world is less violent than it has ever been. It is healthier than it has ever been. It is more tolerant than it has ever been. It is better fed then it’s ever been. It is more educated than it’s ever been.” – Barack Hussein Obama

These missions have taken on new urgency as the U.S. military keeps a closer eye on China’s increasingly assertive territorial claims, including an unprecedented island-building campaign in the nearby South China Sea.

On any given day, U.S. aircraft bristling with cameras, sensors and advanced electronics crisscross the region, hunting submarines, surface ships and aircraft — and charting progress on massive landfills that have suddenly appeared from submerged reefs and shoals.

The fear is that these islands will provide bases for China to restrict air traffic or threaten vital shipping lanes.

The Navy’s patrol fleet has grown from 12 to 16 aircraft in the last three years and includes state-of-the-art P-8 Poseidons, militarized versions of Boeing 737s that are being deployed first to the Pacific.

“We go out, we watch, we look and we listen, to all things going on. And we do it routinely,” says Navy Capt. Mike Parker, who commands the patrol fleet. Parker said U.S. aircraft remain in international airspace throughout their missions.

He spoke to a USA TODAY reporter invited on a training mission aboard Pelican One.

U.S. officials have watched with alarm since China began its landfill operations in the South China Sea last year, creating artificial islands with astonishing speed.

Commercial satellite images show extensive landfill and construction on at least seven previously submerged reefs or atolls in the Spratly Islands group, located west of the Philippines.

Some of the new islands include runways that can accommodate China’s biggest military aircraft, along with port facilities and dozens of multistory buildings, according to the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, a research project sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

“China is creating a ‘Great Wall of Sand’ with dredges and bulldozers,” Adm. Harry Harris, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, warned in a speech in Australia on April 1. Harris said that raises “serious questions about Chinese intentions.”

Jesus said 3) “Nation will go to war against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.”

Well, I just wrote about that. The word Jesus uses translated as “nation” is “ethnos.” “Nation will rise against nation” is more accurately, “Ethnic group will rise against ethnic group.” Or Race will rise against race.

Jesus declared 4) “There will be earthquakes in many parts of the world, as well as famines. But this is only the first of the birth pains, with more to come.”

Natural disasters, anyone? We have them in abundance like we have never before seen. We have a crippling historic drought in my state of California that is growing more and more terrible while we have floods elsewhere to fulfill what God declared would happen to a nation that abandoned Him: “I kept the rain from falling when your crops needed it the most. I sent rain on one town but withheld it from another. Rain fell on one field, while another field withered away” (Amos 4:7). Earthquakes? The world is watching Nepal reel from the recent aftermath of one as we speak, with thousands dead.

I know how godless man reasons, because the Bible tells me: “They will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation” (2 Peter 3:4). But I’ve been pointing out that these same godless people ignorantly declare the truth of God’s Word everyday as they exploit every phenomena as “global warming” or “climate change” when it is just one more part of what our LORD told us would happen as we reached the end of days before divine judgment plunged the world into living hell.

And Jesus promised believers 5) “watch out! You will be handed over to the local councils and beaten in the synagogues. You will stand trial before governors and kings because you are My followers.” And we are watching it happen all over the world as Islamic State leads planet earth in the slaughter of Christians, as more Christians have been martyred these last few years than in all of history combined, as the Obama system of “justice” persecutes and punishes and terrorizes Christians for taking a stand against the sodomy of marriage and says that as Christian bakers they won’t bake cakes for gay weddings and as Christian wedding photographers they won’t depict the perversion of God-ordained marriage and as Christian pizza restaurateurs they won’t allow their property be used to celebrate homosexual perversion of marriage that has always throughout all of history been the union of one man and one woman.

The beast is coming. War like we have never even had nightmares of before is coming. And we’re watching it metastasize right now under Obama.

“The mystery of lawlessness” is that as all of these horrors engulf us there will be nothing the righteous can do about it to stop it. We stand dismayed but the Bible said these “perilous times” were coming. We were foretold that “Many will be purified, cleansed, and refined by these trials. But the wicked will continue in their wickedness, and none of them will understand. Only those who are wise will know what it means” (Daniel 12:10).

Many Christians aren’t sure whether a saved person can be lost again or whether once saved they are eternally saved. If a believer is unsettled on this crucial truth, doubts/fears/insecurity are bound to thrive. In place of truth, the devil continually presents wrong teachings, doubts and false reasonings. In the Garden of Eden he pulled those strings suggesting, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” (Gen. 3:1). And the distortion of the clear Word of God has been with us ever since. The Holy Spirit calls for simple faith in the Word of God. Joy comes by accepting what God has told us plainly in His Word, rather than by allowing our confidence to be confused/stolen by a verse that is difficult to understand. The first principle of interpreting Scripture is this: If there are passages that might seem to suggest Christian might lose their salvation, there are many others which with crystal clarity clearly state that we have genuine eternal security in Christ. A second principle which follows is the always seek to read the Word of God from God’s perspective rather than bringing the fallen wisdom and flawed philosophies and reasonings of sinful man. So when it comes to salvation, people who are reading the Bible from man’s point of view are coming to God’s Word with the view that salvation is up to us – when the Bible says salvation is up to God. The Bible says that God predestined us, foreknew us, called us, chose us, elected us, appointed us. Don’t dismiss the sovereign role of God in salvation.

The question is do we hold on to our salvation? Or is it eternally held? If our salvation depends on your “holding on,” then we should MORE than doubt our eternal security. Because our salvation is up to us. Rather, God’s Word says, “Being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:6). It asks, “Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?” (Gal. 3:3). We are told that “Salvation comes from the LORD” (Jonah 2:9) rather than from us or anything we can do. The New Living Translation for that verse is even clearer on this point: “For my salvation comes from the LORD alone.” Ephesians 2:8-9 argues, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.” And we’re assured, “if we are faithless, He remains faithful, for he cannot disown himself” (2 Tim 2:13). If you want to hold on to your salvation and make it all about you and what you can do for yourself, even by making it all about YOUR faith rather than GOD’S work, well, you go ahead. As for me, I’m counting upon God to hold it for me.

Many want to claim that if we can choose to be saved, well, surely we can choose to be UNsaved. But without bothering to venture into the debate between Armenians and Calvinists (I am actually a Molinist who upholds both human free will AND God’s absolute sovereignty), let me show how that is a false dilemma. When a Christian freely confesses Jesus as Christ and Lord, that Christian freely makes Christ the Master of his/her life. The last sentence in 1 Corinthians 6:19 reads, “You are not your own.” And the first sentence of 1 Corinthians 6:20 says, “You were bought at a price.” If you confessed Christ as Lord, you freely chose with your own free will to make yourself what the Bible calls a “bondslave” of Jesus Christ and of God (e.g. Eph 4:12; 1 Pet 2:16). If you’ve made yourself God’s slave, you can’t decide you get to go free; because that decision is not UP to you, but to your Master. And Jesus says He doesn’t let anyone out of His hand (John 10:28). You used your free will to make yourself His, to give your soul to Him. Which is to say you ALREADY exercised your free will. And it is not the kind of decision you can unmake/undecided any more than you can decide to commit suicide by jumping out of a high flying airplane without a parachute and then “undecided” to re-exercise your free will as you are hurtling toward the ground. In that example, you exercised your free will in a one-time decision to choose death; if you confess Christ as Lord, you used your free will in a one-time decision to choose life. And you can’t take that choice back.

If we can lose our salvation, there would have to be THREE classes of people: the saved, the unsaved, and the ones who used to be saved but lost their salvation. There would be the (saved) sheep, the (unsaved) goats, and the sheep-goats. And those who were elected/appointed/predestined/called to be SAVED by God (e.g. Acts 13:48; Rom 8:27-30; 9:11,16,23-24; Eph 1:4-6, etc.), were thus subsequently RE-elected/RE-appointed/RE-destined/RE-called to be UNsaved by the God of salvation. I don’t see that in God’s Word. I don’t see God appointing someone to eternal life and then re-appointing that same individual to eternal death after He had appointed him/her to eternal life. Colossians 1:13 says “For He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son He loves”; it does NOT say that God does the opposite and transfers believers back into the dominion of darkness. See John 5:24 (“whoever hears My word and believes Him who sent Me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life”); see 1 John 3:14 (“We know that we have passed from death to life”). Show me ONE passage that clearly states that process EVER works the other direction.

Jesus provides a powerful assurance to His sheep: “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow Me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of My hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of My Father’s hand. I and the Father are one” (John 10:27-30). First of all, just how can life be “eternal” if it can be changed to eternal death? And second, if salvation comes from the LORD alone, and if no one is able to snatch us out of God’s hand, well, what’s the question again about losing your eternal salvation?

Those verses beg one question: how can you have “eternal life” and lose it? Doesn’t “eternal life” by its very definition mean that you can never die and that you will live forever? If I can have eternal life today and lose it tomorrow, I don’t have eternal life today and frankly can’t ever have it because “eternal life” becomes like a “square circle” and doesn’t even make any sense. It is non sequitur to “lose your eternal life.” If you have “eternal life” it can NEVER be lost or it wouldn’t be very “eternal.”

As sheep, our security is the responsibility of our Shepherd (1 Pet. 2:25) as “the Overseer/Guardian of our souls.” The Bible repeatedly points out the fact that it is the NATURE of sheep to wander/stray (Isaiah 53:6). And what does God DO when His sheep wander? See Matt 18:12. We “are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed” (1 Peter 1:5).

Are there passages that give us reason to believe that not everyone who says they’re Christians are actually Christians? Yes. Jesus taught the parable of the sower (Matt 13:3-8): there was seed that was sowed on the road, and the birds came and ate it up; there was seed that fell on rocky places and seemed to spring up, but having no true root, withered; there was seed sown among the thorns and again the lack of true roots choked out the shoots; and then there was the seed that was sown on good soil that sprang up with real roots and yielded a crop. But what Jesus does NOT say is that the seed that is sown on good soil with real roots will perish! Hebrews 6:4-7 is a favorite passage that people who teach “eternal INsecurity” rely upon. But they are WRONG for TWO reasons: 1) the passage doesn’t merely suggest – on their own reading – that you can lose your salvation; because on that view it flat out states that “it is IMPOSSIBLE to renew them again to repentance” (vs 6). So if you think you’ve lost your salvation, don’t bother trying to get it back again. And 2) while there is suggestive language used “enlightened,” “tasted,” “partakers,” the word “saved” or “salvation” is NOT used of them and in fact is CONTRASTED to them in verse 9 (“But, beloved, we are convinced of better things concerning you, and things that accompany salvation”). I submit to you that this passage is describing an individual who has “tasted” but not “eaten” the Bread of Life. They have been around it; they have been surrounded by it – but they simply never made that true decision for Jesus. Franklin Graham was surrounded/immersed with Jesus; he saw all kind of miracles. But he wasn’t saved until he made his own decision at age 22. And many others so surrounded by faith never make that decision of faith for themselves. And so they end up having “fallen away” the same way that the seed in Jesus’ parable lacking the true root ends up dying.

[For the record, many exegetes believe Hebrews 6 refers to Jews who had professed faith in Christ, but when persecution against Christians came, forsook Christ and returned to their Judaism and began offering animal sacrifices again – tantamount to profaning the blood of Christ (Heb 10:2-3)].

I think 1 John 2:19 sums it up best: “They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.” There are pseudo-Christians to whom Jesus will say, “I never knew you” (Matt. 7:21-23). The point here is that they were NEVER known; that is, they were never saved even if they appeared from the human perspective to be saved. Jesus is most certainly NOT saying, “I used to know you, but you lost your salvation and now I don’t know you any more.” He’s saying He NEVER knew them at all. By contrast, Jesus says “I know My sheep” (John 10:27). And Jesus says that His sheep will “never perish but have eternal life.” (John 10:28). How can eternal life be eternal if it can be lost, particularly when Jesus said they will never perish? If they will never perish, then they obviously can’t lose their salvation. Also, Paul says that nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God (Rom. 8:38-39). Read the Bible from The Author’s Point of view; you can’t consider the divine perspective and doubt that salvation is eternal and secure.

In terms of eternal life truly being eternal and salvation truly being of the LORD, I love this passage which provides a powerful guarantee that God will keep them despite their tendency to sin/stray: “But Zion said, ‘The LORD has forsaken me, the Lord has forgotten me.’ Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands; your walls are ever before me” (Isaiah 49:14-16). And Christians have a pair of nail-scarred hands – with those nails being driven into His hands WHILE WE WERE YET SINNERS (Rom 5:8) AND ENEMIES OF GOD (Rom 5:10) – that guarantee us that our salvation is secure as long as Jesus bears the nail-engraved scars on His hands (Luke 24:39; John 20:27; Rev 5:6). We are saved as long as Christ is alive, because Heb 7:25 states: “Therefore He is able to save completely those who come to God through Him, because He always lives to intercede for them.”

Are there passages that suggest to us that we if we are living just like the world, that we might still BE of the world? Yes. People want to say if you deny Christ, you can lose your salvation, for example. But, for all of Peter’s denials of Jesus, Jesus didn’t say to Him, “You lost your salvation.” Jesus restored Peter. And as to my relationship, having been born again and indwelt by the Holy Spirit (Eph. 1:13), I am a child of God (Rom 8:16), I have eternal life (John 3:16), I am “in Christ” and a member of His body (1 Cor. 12:13). I am no longer in Adam, but a new creature in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17). And so are YOU if you EVER truly knew Jesus.

Some of the passages that emphasize eternal security for believers:

John 6:39: “And this is the will of Him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those He has given Me, but raise them up at the last day.”

John 6:40: “For My Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in Him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.”

2 Tim. 1:12: “…I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that He is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day.”

Rom 5:10: “For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to Him through the death of His Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through His life!”

Jer 21:23: …“I have loved you with an everlasting love…”

Rom 8:30: “And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.”

2 Tim 1:9: “He has saved us and called us to a holy life–not because of anything we have done but because of His own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time.”

John 1:12-13: “Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God — children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.”

1 John 3:2: “Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.”

John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

2 Cor 5:17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”

Colossians 3:3: “For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.”

If you are what is commonly described as “a backslidden Christian,” there is a high price that you will pay in this life until you are truly right with God. You will suffer hardships in this life that you may not have suffered and you will miss out on rewards in heaven that you could have received while you were backslidden. But you will NOT pay the ultimate penalty of hell. Because when you confessed Christ as your Savior and Lord, He took ALL of your sins upon Himself once for all and for all time. Let me try to explain in my own story.

My testimony: I became a Christian at age 15 on September 25, 1979 at Forest Home, when I went with my high school youth group. I’d grown up in church, but had never truly experienced God (He was an old man with a big white beard in a bathrobe who saw everything I did – and disapproved) or Jesus (He was a wimpy guy carrying around a wimpy sheep) as something I wanted in my life. At Forest Home, I first encountered Jesus as someone powerful who I truly wanted to follow. I prayed to open my heart to Christ that day.

I came home changed. My two best friends ultimately became Christians because of my transformation. One is a Wycliffe missionary and the other became a pastor.

I entered the military. But I ended up like too many young men end up today, wounded and injured. And the experience broke me both in body and in faith. I simply could not understand why God had allowed me to get hurt. And when I cried out to God, He did not seem to come to my rescue. I came out of the Army bitter and questioning. What good is God? Is He even real? And I lived for a number of years like a pagan.

Because I truly had been saved, I knew deep down that I wasn’t living rightly. The backslidden Christian is the most miserable creature on earth, because on the one hand he/she doesn’t have the power to live a joyful and triumphant life pleasing to God and on the other hand as one who has the Holy Spirit within he/she can’t take true pleasure in sin the way unbelievers can. You can sin, but there is a nagging sense that you are doing wrong. In my heart, I knew where I needed to be. I claimed to doubt God, but whenever I was in a tight spot, I prayed. More than once, I had the realization that God would not let me die like this.

That said, I wasn’t going to church and I sure wasn’t living as a Christian.

I knew already in my heart that if there was no God, then there was no morality. As Dostoevsky put it, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” And that if Mother Teresa and Adolf Hitler had the same end, morality is for fools and everyone should be as wicked and selfish as the slogan “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” entails. But I knew deep-down that wasn’t true. I knew right from wrong because the Holy Spirit lived in me. And it was because the Holy Spirit lived inside me that the entire time I was rebelling against God, I was miserable. I couldn’t enjoy the immorality that the world could wallow in. Deep down I always knew that I was on the wrong path. At the same time, I couldn’t enjoy my experience with God because I constantly knew that I was not pleasing Him. I was stuck in the middle of the road in a deep rut.

It took years for me to reach the end of myself and finally come to the point where my resistance to God had softened such that I could miss the relationship that I had once truly had. But I had to know for sure that my faith was in something/Someone REAL. I began to search.

I first considered evolution, because if evolution was true there was no need for God and frankly no point IN God. I read Richard Dawkins’ Blind Watchmaker and was actually more convinced of the reality of God when I put it down than I’d been when I’d started reading it. I was appalled by the foolish reasoning and by the trivial dismissals of arguments that deserved profound exploration. I read another book called Darwin’s Enigma by Luther Sunderland and was amazed at how bad the arguments for evolution truly are even according to many leading evolutionists. But it took my examination of the historicity of the Resurrection and the marvel of prophecy to make me realize: it really happened. On January 30, 1997, I prayed a prayer of re-dedication. And I had an experience of a Presence just barely within my peripheral vision. The passage, “And you will hear a voice behind you…” immediately flooded into my mind, and I wept like a baby as I realized that I had turned my back on Jesus, but that He had NEVER turned His back on me.

Did I lose my salvation and find it again? No. Like Peter, I had been sifted like wheat. And I had folded like a cheap suit. But like Jesus said, I was in His hand, and He wasn’t going to let go of me. No matter how lost I felt, Jesus knew exactly where I was every second of every day. And He never gave up on me, never quit working in my mind and in my heart. Because as God says in His Word, “I will never leave you or forsake you” (Heb 13:5). And He won’t. That is a promise from God.